Mission & Policy

Mission

The NCG Foundation’s aims are:

  1. Promoting consultation between parties from science and practice in the field of geo-informatics and geodesy with the aim of:
    • Transfering knowledge between science and practice;
    • Advising on knowledge development and research, tailored to the anticipated needs of Dutch society;
    • Promoting strategic exploration, scenario studies and trend analyses with regard to technical-scientific developments in this field and to initiate research in this context;
      this also for the purpose of shaping the government’s geo-informatics policy, including the earth observation policy.
  2. Carrying out all further actions that are related to the foregoing in the broadest sense or that may be conducive thereto.
 

Policy

The NCG promotes the quality and interests of geodesy and geo-informatics these sciences and is committed to an optimal contribution to society.
The NCG conducts strategic explorations, scenario studies and trend analyses with regard to technical-scientific developments in this field and initiates research.
Consultation in the committees between representatives from the research sector and civil society must lead to timely choices being made for knowledge development and research, tailored to the anticipated needs of Dutch society.
The most important social trends identified by the NCG are:

  • Geodata are available anywhere and anytime
  • Need for flexible infrastructure for storage and access to data
  • More attention to the quality and meaning of data and information
  • More cooperation between companies, government and science
  • The information world is accessible and safe for everyone
  • Growing importance and increased use of GeoAI.
 

With the policy plan 2023-2027, the NCG has redefined the focus area for the coming period and will coordinate its activities with other umbrella organisations in the Netherlands.
From a scientific perspective, the NCG stands for the objectives stated below:

Knowledge development

  • Keeping The Netherlands in the top 5 countries in the world in terms of scientific research within the NCG domain.
  • Identifying gaps in knowledge development.


Knowledge transfer

  • Increasing visibility of the NCG’s field of work.
  • Intensifying knowledge transfer to practice.
  • Keeping the need for geo-information education on the agenda.


External collaboration

  • Expansion of cooperation with government and business in the context of GeoSamen, among others.
  • Developing interaction between national and international science.


Internal knowledge transfer

  • Bringing the right people together, especially for discussions that go beyond the scope of current committees.
  • Involving young researchers more in NCG activities.

 

GeoSamen (2014)

GeoSamen. GeoSamen. Under this title, government, business and science jointly presented a broadly shared vision of the future of the geosector in 2014 (see also www.geosamen.nl).
Two consultation structures have been set up within GeoSamen, the TopTeam and the Strategic Consultation.
The TopTeam supervises and focuses on promoting cooperation within the sector and increasing the visibility of the sector and consists of three representatives from Geobusiness Netherlands, the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment and the NCG.
The Strategic Consultation consists of representatives from the business community, government and research and science.

 

Field of the NCG

Geodesy and geo-information are understood to mean the collection, processing and distribution of spatial information (on and around the Earth’s surface), the analysis of the mutual geometric relationships and their presentation. This includes positioning, remote sensing, calculation techniques with large vector and raster files, quality determination of the location and geometric relationships, knowledge of the structures of data files and navigation. We do not include thematic data and the analysis and interpretation of those themes as part of the NCG’s focus area, as long as it does not concern the geometric component.

The historical limitation “on and around the Earth’s surface” has been deliberately placed in brackets, so that geodesy and geo-information can also make their techniques available to other spatial databases from other fields and applications, for example medicine, the deformation of models in the wind tunnel and (terrestrial) photogrammetry for architecture.

Geodesy and geo-information provide services to other sciences and social applications. That is why a relationship with those sciences and organisations in the field of social applications is of great importance.