Jack Dangermond
Founder and President of ESRI

Jack Dangermond is the founder and president of ESRI, the technical and market leader in GIS software. ESRI (Redlands, California) pioneers innovative solutions for working with spatial data on the desktop, across the enterprise, in the field and on the Web.

ESRI has the largest GIS software install base in the world with more than one million users in more than 100,000 organizations representing business, government, Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), and academia. Mr. Dangermond fostered the growth of ESRI from a small research group to an organization of 2,700 employees, known internationally for GIS software development, training and services. ESRI now has 16 subsidiaries as well as more than 90 distributors worldwide. ESRI also has 11 regional offices throughout the United States and continues to grow at a steady rate.

Mr. Dangermond is recognized not only as a pioneer in spatial analysis methods, but also as one of the most influential people in GIS. Over the last 30 years, Mr. Dangermond has delivered keynote addresses at numerous international conferences, published hundreds of papers on GIS, and given thousands of presentations on GIS around the world. He is the recipient of a number of awards, honorary degrees, lectureships and medals.

Chris Steenmans
Project manager at European Environment Agency - Group leader Data Access and Management

Responsibilities at EEA:

Chris is managing the EEA GIS team and has lead responsibility for the development of the EEA Spatial Information System. He started at EEA in 1997 as project manager land cover and remote sensing and is coordinator of the CORINE Land Cover programme covering 30 European countries. He coordinated the creation of the European Topic Centre on Terrestrial Environment, since 2001 located in Barcelona. He contributed to several publications on state of the environment reporting, strategic environmental assessments, environmental indicators, hazards mapping, a.o. Within the preparatory phase of INSPIRE for the development of a European Spatial Data Infrastructure, he was leading the scoping working group and the working group on environmental thematic user needs. He is strongly involved in the implementation of GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security).

Nationality: Belgian
Education: MSc Physical Geography, Catholic University of Leuven (1981)
Specialisation: GIS, remote sensing, land cover mapping

Professional record:

• 1981-1984: Researcher at the Cartographic Laboratory of the University of Leuven
• 1985-1997: Project manager image processing, GIS, remote sensing, photogrammetry and mapping in the private sector
• 1997 – present: Project manager at European Environment Agency - Group leader Data Access and Management http://www.eea.eu.int/main_html

Mr Lars Lorensen
Executive Vice President, CTO, NESA

Mr Lars Lorensen have been responsible for implementing the GIS strategy at NESA – a Danish Electricity company with more than 500.000 customers - starting in the 1980’s until today, where GIS is fully integrated into NESA’s IT Platform

Jean Poulit
EUROGI President

EUROGI-EUROpean umbrella organisation for Geographic Information
(mailing)P.O. Box 9046, NL-7300 BA Apeldoorn
(visiting)Hofstraat 110, 7311 KZ Apeldoorn
The Netherlands
Tel: +31 55 528 5532 / Fax: +31 55 528 5032
Email: eurogi@euronet.nl / www.eurogi.org

Jean Poulit has spent an impressive career as a civil servant to the Ministry of Public Works, Transportation, Housing and Planning within the French Government. He began a local Manager within the Ministry of Public Works, Transportation, Housing and Planning. responsible for transportation planning in western France. He became head of Urban Transportation within the Ministry’s agency for studies on transportation, defining a national policy for transportation. As Deputy Director of the Roads Directorate, he led the development of a national policy for traffic regulation and planning, pollution control and safety education. He later created the “Bison Fûté” (a mechanism to avoid traffic jams). Mr. Poulit also served as Director General of a national agency for energy efficiency, responsible for reducing energy consumption in various sectors such as housing, industry and road transportation. He was also Director General of the agency in charge of the urban development in the eastern end of Paris (Marne la Vallée), devising equipment and transportation facilities and attracting companies to help develop the local economy, which included negotiations with Walt Disney.
As “Préfet” Ile de France and Regional Director for the Ministry, he developed an urban planning strategy and implemented new services including a real-time traffic information system. Jean Poulit also served as Director General of the Institut Géographique National, the French national mapping agency, and for a part of this time period, he was President of the CERCO, and subsequently Vice-President of EuroGeographics.