Organisers

The conference is organised by:

The International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) is the only international organization representing all surveying disciplines. These cover cadastre and land management, spatial information management, positioning and measurement, hydrography, engineering survey, spatial planning, evaluation and real estate management and construction economics and management.

FIG has member associations and other members in more than 110 countries. The member associations represent more than 230,000 surveying professionals. Founded in 1878 FIG is officially recognized as a non-governmental organization (NGO) by the United Nations and its several agencies.

At the moment the administration of the Federation is taken care of by a German Council (2003-2006) chaired by President Holger Magel and with Vice Presidents Andreas Drees and Ralf Schroth from Germany, T.N. Wong from Hong Kong, China, Ken Allred from Canada and Stig Enemark from Denmark. FIG has a permanent office which has been located in Copenhagen since 1999.

For more information, visit the web site at www.fig.net.

The Global Spatial Data Infrastructure supports ready global access to geographic information. This is achieved through the coordinated actions of nations and organizations that promote awareness and implementation of complimentary policies, common standards and effective mechanisms for the development and availability of interoperable digital geographic data and technologies to support decision making at all scales for multiple purposes. These actions encompass the policies, organizational remits, data, technologies, standards, delivery mechanisms, and financial and human resources necessary to ensure that those working at the global and regional scale are not impeded in meeting their objectives.

The core goals:

• Continue to develop awareness and exchanges on SDI development and operations
• Promote and develop standards-based data access/discovery/use through the internet
• Actively promote, encourage, support, and conduct capacity building
• Promote and conduct SDI development and research
• Establish and support active programs for obtaining funding and other resources to accomplish its vision and goals

Over 50 nations have participated in previous GSDI conferences.

For more information, visit the web site at www.gsdi.org

The Egyptian Committee for Surveying and Mapping (ECSM) is a non-governmental organization whose members are academics from universities and professionals from private sector companies and seniors from governmental bodies. These members have the highest experience in the field of geographic information, geodesy, astronomy, and surveying and information technology. This committee is taking care of the researches relating to surveying, mapping, geographic information system, land information system regarding problems facing society, geographic information, publishing technical information, arranging scientific conferences and publishing the new researches, new applications and methodologies in the mentioned fields to all Egyptian engineers. Furthermore ECSM is cooperating on technical matters with the national authorities which are having similar activities to the ECSM.

The Egyptian Committee for Surveying and Mapping (ECSM) is the Egyptian member association of FIG.

The Egyptian Survey Authority (ESA) was established in 1898 to take care of the surveying and mapping in Egypt, but nowadays it works in many different fields relating to the survey. It consists of main sectors (cadastre, topography, geodesy, and printing) ESA is the sole organization, which takes care of surveying, geodesy, and topographic mapping production, cadastre, determination of the administrative boundaries, printing maps & publications, geodetic controls, and Atlases. ESA is also building geographic information systems for the governmental organization, authorities and ministries. Its main goal is to cover Egypt with small scale (1:000 000 – 10 000) and large-scale maps (1:2500 - 1:500). It also produces scale 1: 5000 for the national projects and special requests. Besides, ESA produces orthophoto maps, and uses satellite image in the topographic map production. Of course, behind all this massive work is the information technology, which is the tool for rapid, accurate and efficient products.