Survey of key GI players within Europe - EC GI & GIS Portal

publisher 26 . The company was set up in 1992 with a product range tailored to the telephone and the
Minitel service but since 1997 Planfax has offered an internet based service with content now
delivered via the Web, PDA, SMS, Vocal, I-mode etc. Planfax offers GI content on its www.1bis.com
website, based on the "Yellow Pages" concept. This service automatically places the information from
the telephone directory onto maps. www.1bis.com is relayed to leading portal sites and Internet
service providers. In the business to business market, Planfax has set itself up as a service provider
marketing its mapping & database platform. The French online post-office directory (www.laposte.net)
now incorporates the maps and itineraries of Planfax. The online post-office directory includes 1.9
million businesses and all the private telephone subscribers. For every address in the directory there
is an "access plan" link which calls up a map centred on the desired address. The user can move
about the map by means of a cursor on the screen and can also have the map printed and sent by email.
Without making a search for any particular address, it is also possible to click directly on
"itineraries and plans", to obtain any map in France, an itinerary from one town to another, or the
shortest or quickest route between two addresses.
Created in 1991 and with a staff of 90, Générale d'Infographie (www.generale-infographie.fr/) has
been one of the French key players in GI for many years. It works with a broad range of partners,
including for example ORACLE, Intergraph, Claritas, ESRI, Bentley, GeoConcept to bring a range of
GI solutions. Chief application areas are central and local government, town planning, utilities,
defence, environment, and transport. Some specific product examples are NetGeo (for the
management of telecommunications network infrastructures) and PropGeo (layout and design of
refuse collection rounds).
Going back to 1987 and with a background in remote sensing and agricultural research Geosys
(www.geosys.fr) is now a more broad based GI company with its main activities now being related to
remote sensing, GPS measurements, surveying and sampling, aerial photography, etc. Supply of GI
products and services include data (over 10 satellite sources, altimetric data, digital aerial
photography), agricultural monitoring, provision of crop databases, and precision farming.
Another major player in the fields of GI and earth observation is SCOT (www.scot.fr). It is located in
Toulouse, in the Midi-Pyrénées region, and provides information for the agriculture, environment and
urban & rural planning sectors in particular. Created in 1987 by the Centre National d’Études Spatiales
(CNÉS) (http://www.cnes.fr/) it is now 62% owned by space and aeronautics group CS (http://www.cs.fr/),
and 38% by CNÉS. SCOT designs, develops and operates GI systems which integrate a wide
variety of data; space imagery, aerial photographs, existing maps, field surveys, statistical data. Some
examples of its work include 200 images processed a year (8 campaigns in 15 countries), Common
Agricultural Policy (19 French departments in 2002), regional agricultural maps in Tunisia (20 regions,
4000 maps), rural cadastral mapping in Lithuania (2000 maps), and digitisation of cadastral maps (>1
500 000 plots digitised in 2002). With over 50% of its turnover earned abroad SCOT includes among
its customers organisations such as European Space Agency, Asian Development Bank, World Bank,
Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Ministry of Agriculture Tunisia, Ministry of Agriculture
Russia, United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Its on-line application Geonline is used as a
basis for applications as diverse as municipal information (E-Cité), a metadata server – (GEO-OSS)
and town planning (Arcview2GeOnline® ).
GDTA is an organisation jointly owned by CNES, the French space agency, IGN-F, and until the end
of 2003, BRGM: Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières (French Geological Research
Bureau), and IFREMER: Institut Français de Recherche pour l'Exploitation de la Mer (French institute
of marine research and exploration). It is a training organisation with a staff of 30 who train users in
both France and overseas on the subject of satellite-based remote sensing.
Maporama (www.maporama.com) claims to be “the world's leading enterprise location-centric
services Application Service Provider (ASP).” Maporama was established in France in 2000 with 4.1
Mill venture capital financing by Galileo Partners, FD5 and Financière de Brienne. Its products and
services are based on network (including internet) enabled road and address based applications.
Global 500 companies such as Accor, Bridgestone, L'Oréal, Diageo, Shell and more than 500 other
customers use GI Maporama products and services to “instantly localize street addresses in over 50
countries across all continents; pinpoint addresses of a total population of over 2 billion consumers
worldwide; integrate seamlessly location-centric applications at an international level; and exploit the
most frequently updated and constantly extended array of cartographic data” Maporama has
partnered with other European key players such as TeleAtlas, GeoStrategies, NavTech, AND, and
26 http://www.1bis.com/1bis/planfax/about_us.asp
Survey of key GI players within Europe Page 32