Map Middle East 9-11th April 2007, Dubai

The third Map Middle East Conference, organised by GIS Development and the Municipality of Dubai was held from 9th - 11th April 2007. The conference was structured so that Plenary sessions were held on the first day and on the second and third day parallel technical sessions were also held. ISPRS organised one of these parallel sessions.

The first plenary session had a commercial theme with speakers from Digital Globe, ESRI and SiRF Technologies in India, who emphasised the convergence of geospatial technologies and the importance of location to many users. The second plenary concentrated on engineering application and covered Geoinformatics, a paper from Gottfried Konecny on high resolution imagery, and business intelligence. These sessions set the scene for an interesting conference with a strong interest in commercial developments which was also reflected in the large exhibition which allowed delegates to get a good idea of the technology which is being used and developed in the Middle East.

Each ISPRS session had one or two invited speakers and speakers selected on the basis of the submitted abstracts. The sessions covered the themes of state of the art technologies, applications of GIS and remote sensing, integration of images with GIS and future trends These sessions gave a good overview of the status of photogrammetry and remote sensing and also allowed participants to understand some of the developments in the Middle East.

Attendance at the technical sessions was disappointing, as indeed was the number of speakers who actually turned up and the reasons for putting on such a programme must be questioned. However the Middle East is developing at a rapid rate and the opportunities for the application of geospatial data are substantial, so ISPRS needs to have a presence in the region and be able to show the importance of an international organisation which can represent the community which extracts information from imagery. This is the first time that ISPRS has organised sessions at Map Middle East and it is hoped that there will be future opportunities and a greater interest in future.

Ian Dowman
President ISPRS