Founded in 1978, GICAT, the French land and air-land defense and security industries group, has over 380 members. Its members cover a wide range of industrial, research, service, and consulting activities for the benefit of national and international military and civil components involved in land and air-land security and/or defense. It has established the Data Intelligence Cluster, which represents a single point of access to sovereign data intelligence and protection technologies.
For IGN FI, a company specializing in the development of geomatics projects worldwide, the interest in joining this cluster is strong, as explained by Christophe Dekeyne, CEO of IGN FI. ” The issue of data—its production, updating, and dissemination—is a fundamental sovereignty challenge for states, enabling them to better understand their territory, protect their populations and borders, better anticipate crises—whether military, climatic, or political—and also to react effectively in the event of attacks or disasters. Without this particular attention to the value of data, misjudgments can be made at the staff level and in the field, leading to extremely severe consequences in terms of human lives lost or geopolitical credibility. Governments therefore need to modernize their geographic infrastructures, particularly through the acquisition of reference or value-added data, by establishing more operational geomatics units, by developing appropriate tools, and by training their personnel in the production and exploitation of reference geographic data for any analysis required for territorial surveillance or for the preparation, execution, or debriefing of operational missions .”
IGN FI is a company of GEOFIT Group and IGN France (the French National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information), both highly involved in France and internationally in the field of defense and civil security. Since 2003, GEOFIT has participated in various projects for outsourcing geographic data production for defense, drawing on expertise in tool design, information acquisition, and processing. The French Ministry of Defense, for its part, relies on IGN’s expertise to exploit the potential of spatial imagery, exchange interoperable data with its allies, and benefit from its know-how and research work in the production and dissemination of geographic data.
IGN FI has distinguished itself in recent years in projects involving the mapping of border areas and geographic data infrastructures for the benefit of states or international organizations such as the World Customs Organization.
