Dear Congress Participants,
Welcome to Amsterdam,
Four years have gone by very quickly since the Nether-
lands Society for Earth Observation and Geoinformatics
(NSEOG) in Vienna was given the privilege of organising
the XIXth ISPRS Congress. After being appointed Con-
gress Director, | immediately realised that this was going
to give me a lot of work. Little did | realise how much sat-
isfaction | was going to derive during these four years from
the interaction with so many colleagues world-wide who
are part of the ISPRS network and strongly committed to
its mandate. We were able to meet in many different
places of the world during seminars, symposia and work-
shops, all the time witnessing a Society within which the
representatives of very diverse disciplines are getting
closer and closer, both personally and professionally,
: thanks to rapidly improving information and communica-
tion technologies. | am really looking forward very much to
seeing them this week again in Amsterdam.
The question arises, with all this networking, of whether
. we are going to need these big congresses at all in the
future? Should we start thinking of electronic meetings?
So far, most people seem to agree that we need to meet
in person; at least, the interest for our Congress is not less
than for the previous one. However we have made some
changes in the organisation of the Congress, the most
important one being the shortening of the length of the
Congress from two weeks to one week. A compact Con-
gress has the advantage that everyone will be there at the
same time, which is in particular of interest to the
exhibitors who usually have only one week to show their
new products and services. |
Maybe it was because we are witnessing the start of the
new millennium, inducing great expectations and renewed
ideals, maybe it was because the Congress is in Amster-
dam, a city with a rather non-conformist and liberal iden-
tity, that we felt that this Congress should have a strong
sense of social purpose, that is why we choose the Con-
gress Theme ‘Geoinformation for All’. What we wanted to
discuss is really: in the near future, do we want to live in
one world, or in several, where the benefits of the new
information age and of our technologies can not be
equally shared for all kinds of reasons which have led to
the presently existing inequalities. Can our new informa-
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Opening Speech by Prof.Dr.Ir. Klaas-Jan Beek, Congress Director
tion technologies contribute to quick solutions for less
developed countries by ‘leap-frogging’ some of the con-
straints which the richer countries have already been able
to eliminate at considerable cost? Supposing that spa-
tial/geo information has a crucial role to play in all kinds of
development processes?
| am very glad that we have found a keynote speaker for our
Opening Ceremony who is very well qualified to comment
on these issues from the user requirements point of view:
Ismael Serageldin, until very recently Vice President of the
World Bank for Special Programmes, in which capacity he
chaired the CGIAR, the Consultative Group for International
Agricultural research, a consortium of sixteen international
research institutes with a budget of around 360 million US
dollars per year to contribute to global food security, in par-
ticular the security of the World's poor. Serageldin also
chairs the Global Water Partnership and the World Com-
mission on Water for the 21st Century and is therefore very
much involved with the looming global water crisis.
In addition, we have during the Opening Plenary Session
three very well qualified speakers from our own environ-
ment to comment on the Congress theme, K. Kasturiran-
gan, the Director of the Indian Space Research Organiza-
tion (ISRO), Jack Dangermond, the President of ESRI and
He Changchui, head of the remote sensing unit at FAO.
They will look from their professional angles at issues of
availability, accessibility, benefit, understandability, useful-
ness and affordability of geoinformation in the years to
come. By having these presentations during the Plenary
Opening Session of our Congress, | am sure that this will
encourage a good discussion on the ultimate purpose and
application of our sciences in problem-solving under differ-
ent socio-economic conditions, during subsegnent days
when we split up into smaller groups of a more specialised
nature. To encourage a broader look at the challenges of
our professions we have also organised, in co-operation
with the Technical Commission Presidents, about thirty
Inter-commission Technical Sessions.
| acknowledge in particular the support of Commission V,
which, of course, is not in the first place focused on geo
information but on spatial information for other than geo-
graphical applications. Their field is attracting a growing
al Archives of Phot
rty and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXIII, Part A. Amsterdam 2000.
