Ingrid Vanden Berghe

Mapping Agencies as Geo-Information Brokers

BY INGRID VANDEN BERGHE

Administrator General, National Geographic Institute, Belgium

With the advent of digitization, some national mapping agencies are broadening their role to become geo-information brokers for governments. This is the direction that the National Geographic Institute of Belgium is taking. The brokering works in two ways — outwards to provide government information publicly and inwards to ensure that government has the data it needs.

The first way is about providing access to people. The INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) initiative in Europe has made it mandatory for governments to ensure that environmental spatial information is shared among public sector organizations, facilitating public access to spatial information and assisting in policy-making. There is considerable value in governmental spatial data to help economic growth and people’s welfare. Governments need to be encouraged to take a geographical approach when dealing with information, be it environmental data, economic data, or public health data. We have to make people understand the geospatial elements in information, so they can access and apply the necessary tools to use it for better outcomes.

Second, mapping agencies have to ensure that government has accurate geospatial information to take good decisions. This involves collecting data from different agencies and sources and making it available nationally. It also requires working with neighbouring countries to meet crossborder information needs through products and services.

Our change in direction is not through political mandate. We are a politically uninteresting organization. That said, the government is supportive of what we do, because we do our job well.

Data policy It is important we have a good data policy. I am personally not convinced about providing all data for free. The private sector is more concerned about data quality and accessibility than (reasonable) cost.

Data governance does provide some challenges that we work with others to overcome. There are certain areas in which access to geospatial information has to be limited for security and defense reasons. I think the role of a mapping agency is to make sure the data that is put out in the public domain is compliant with national security constraints and so we work with the Ministry of Interior to get this right. On the issue of privacy, we are establishing a dialog with the Privacy Commission on how to treat geospatial information, so that data providers and users do not face unexpected challenges.

Tech impact on business Rapid innovation around technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and the Cloud has had a great impact on everyone, and national mapping agencies are no exception. Today, you can just get into the Cloud on your phone and do all your work easily. It is this growing use of technology that mapping agencies must embrace and support. Although we started adopting the digital approach in 1990s, today we are not amongst the early adopters of new approaches. The stress on resources since we work with public money is a factor in this. Also, there is a growing idea that everyone is a mapper and that government mapping activities are becoming irrelevant. So we have to demonstrate the necessity for authoritative geodata and therefore we have to prioritize resilience and security and the underlying needs for authoritative geodata and services.

Rapid innovation around technologies has had a great impact on everyone, and national mapping agencies are no exception.

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