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Division of Geoinformation

This page gives a summary of the activity fields and organization structure of the division geoinformation.

Detailed descriptions for Development activities, Production, and Service Centre you can find on navigation menu.

Tasks

The core tasks comprise

supply of the Federal institutions with analog and digital topographic cartographic information,
counseling of the Federal Government in the field of geoinformation and
safeguarding of German interests at the international level.

In close cooperation with the Land survey authorities topographic information is provided in the form of

digital basic geodata of different levels of resolution and
topographic map series of different scales

as well as the methods and procedures required for this purpose are further developed while taking into account the relevant most recent scientific findings and technologies in these fields.

Products

The Geoinformation Division attends to the production, among others, of the small-scale ATKIS® products, which include in particular the Digital Landscape Models at the scales 1 : 250,000 and 1 : 1,000,000, the small-scale Digital Topographic Map series and the pertinent analog map series.

Service Centre

By the Dienstleistungszentrum (DLZ) (Service Center) of the Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie (BKG) (Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy) geodetic and geotopographic reference data of the Federal government are centrally made available to Federal institutions and authorities, public administrative agencies, businesses, and single citizens. The establishment of the service center is based on the Bundesgeoreferenzdatengesetz (BGeoRG) (Federal Act on geo reference data), which came into force on 1 November 2012. This law regulates the use, quality and technology concerning the geodetic and geotopographic reference systems, networks and data.

Training of Geomatics Engineering Technologist

The Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie offers a three-year training course as a Geomatics Engineering Technologist. The task of Geomatics Engineering Technologist consists in the preparation and updating of topographic and thematic maps as well as related representations. Presentational graphics by means of digital techniques and multimedial products obtained from space-referenced data of all kinds constitute a new main field of activity.

Contributions to International Cooperation Projects

The Geoinformation division is contributing via EuroGeographics to cooperation projects which are conceived to set up and update topographic-cartographic data bases on a European and global level.

The first available European cross-border dataset is the EuroBoundaryMap for which the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) is coordinating the Europe-wide production.

Also for another project, the EuroDEM, - a terrain model including more than 27 European countries -, the BKG is responsible for organization, data fusion and quality check.

More projects with BKG participation are the digital medium and small-scale map series EuroRegionalMap in the scale 1:250 000 and EuroGlobalMap in the scale 1:1 000 000.

The BKG is actively contributing to the set-up of a European Spatial Data Infrastructure (ESDI) within the frame of “INSPIRE”; an initiative of the EU Commission by supporting work in expert groups and accompanying development projects. Experts of our house are also working for international standardization activities in the field of geoinformation and for United Nations bodies in the field of the Standardization of Geographical Names.

Hosted Sites

The Geoinformation Division is in charge of the following hosted sites:

Working Group ’Automation in Cartography’ (AgA) of the Working Committee of the Survey Administrations of the States of the Federal Republic of Germany (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Vermessungsverwaltungen der Länder der Bundesrepublik Deutschland) (AdV) and of the German Geodetic Commission (Deutsche Geodätische Kommission) (DGK)
Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (Ständiger Ausschuss für geographische Namen) (StAGN)
Publication Office of the European Spatial Data Research Organization (EuroSDR, formerly OEEPE)