Behind every edition of ISPRS Geospatial Week 2025 stands the organisation that gives the event its name and its scientific rigour: the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, or ISPRS. This guide explains what ISPRS is, its mission, how it is structured, what it publishes, and how it organises both Geospatial Week and the ISPRS Congress.

What Is ISPRS?

ISPRS stands for the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. It is a non-governmental, non-profit organisation dedicated to the development of international cooperation in the sciences and technologies of photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information systems. Founded well over a century ago, it is one of the oldest international scientific societies in its field, and it operates through national member organisations, regional bodies and a global network of researchers. Its longevity and international reach are part of what give events like ISPRS Geospatial Week 2025 their credibility and their broad participation.

To see how the society's work translates into a specific event, our complete guide to ISPRS Geospatial Week 2025 puts the organisation in context.

The ISPRS Mission

The mission of ISPRS centres on advancing knowledge and promoting the application of photogrammetry, remote sensing and geoinformation for the benefit of society and the environment. In practical terms this means fostering scientific research, encouraging the exchange of ideas across national and disciplinary boundaries, supporting education and capacity building, and promoting the responsible use of geospatial technologies. The society explicitly aims to serve both the scientific community and the wider public good, with applications ranging from environmental monitoring and disaster response to urban planning and cultural heritage documentation.

How ISPRS Is Structured: Commissions and Working Groups

ISPRS organises its scientific activity through a set of technical commissions, each responsible for a broad thematic area of the field. Within each commission sit numerous working groups that focus on more specific research topics. This two-tier structure is central to how the society operates:

  • Technical Commissions coordinate the major domains of the discipline, such as sensor systems, image analysis, photogrammetry, remote sensing applications and spatial information science.
  • Working Groups tackle focused subjects within each commission, running specialised workshops, benchmarks and collaborative projects.
  • Officers and volunteers from member organisations lead these groups, ensuring the agenda reflects the community's real research priorities.

This commission-and-working-group model is precisely what makes an event like Geospatial Week possible: the individual workshops that co-locate at Geospatial Week often grow directly out of working-group activity. You can see how that plays out in our overview of what ISPRS Geospatial Week is.

ISPRS Publications

A major part of the society's contribution to science is its publication program. ISPRS maintains several respected, largely open-access outlets, most notably the ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences and the ISPRS Archives, which together publish peer-reviewed papers from ISPRS events. The society is also associated with a leading international journal in the field. For authors, publishing through ISPRS channels offers a citable, widely indexed and permanently accessible record. This is one reason the call for papers matters so much for prospective contributors; you can read more in our guide to the ISPRS call for papers for Geospatial Week 2025.

ISPRS and Geospatial Week

ISPRS organises Geospatial Week as a focused, biennial gathering of co-located workshops. The society, through its commissions and working groups, defines the scientific scope, oversees the peer-review process, and ensures that accepted papers meet its publication standards. Local organising committees, usually hosted by a national member organisation or university, handle the on-the-ground logistics of each edition. This division of labour keeps the scientific quality consistent while allowing each host to bring its own character to the event. For the thematic side of the 2025 edition, see the expected key topics of Geospatial Week 2025.

ISPRS and the Congress

Alongside Geospatial Week, ISPRS organises its flagship Congress, a much larger event held every four years. The Congress covers the full breadth of the society's commissions and also includes the society's formal governance activities, such as the election of officers and the setting of the technical agenda for the coming term. Geospatial Week and the Congress are complementary: the Congress is the society's grand, comprehensive assembly, while Geospatial Week is its agile, specialised counterpart. We compare the two directly in Geospatial Week vs the ISPRS Congress.

ISPRS International Collaboration

A distinguishing feature of ISPRS is that it operates as a federation of national and regional member organisations rather than as a body of individual members alone. Countries participate through their designated ordinary members, and the society also welcomes regional bodies, sustaining members from industry, and associate members. This federated model gives ISPRS genuine global reach and ensures that its scientific agenda reflects the priorities of a wide range of nations and research traditions. It is also why ISPRS events, including Geospatial Week 2025, tend to be strongly international in their attendance, with delegates and authors from every continent. The collaborative ethos extends to joint initiatives with other scientific unions and international bodies working on Earth observation, mapping and geoinformation.

Education, Benchmarks and Community Resources

Beyond conferences and publications, ISPRS invests in the long-term health of the field. Its working groups produce benchmark datasets that allow researchers to compare methods on common ground, an increasingly important activity in an era of machine learning where fair evaluation matters enormously. The society also supports summer schools, tutorials, awards for outstanding research and student contributions, and educational resources aimed at building capacity in developing regions. Many of these activities surface directly at Geospatial Week, where tutorials and short courses give newcomers a route into the community. This wider ecosystem of resources is part of what makes participation in an ISPRS event valuable well beyond the days of the event itself.

Why the Society Matters to Attendees

For anyone considering attending or contributing to ISPRS Geospatial Week 2025, understanding the society explains a great deal about the event's culture. The emphasis on peer review, open-access publication and international collaboration all flow directly from the society's mission and structure. It also explains the event's reliability: because ISPRS is a long-standing institution with a global membership, its events maintain consistent standards from one edition to the next. If you are weighing up whether to take part, our guide on who should attend Geospatial Week 2025 may help you decide.

Confirming Official Information

ISPRS itself is the authoritative source for anything relating to its events. For confirmed details about ISPRS Geospatial Week 2025, including dates, host city, venue, registration and committee membership, always consult ISPRS.org and the official ISPRS Geospatial Week 2025 website. As a durable, member-driven scientific society, ISPRS provides the definitive and up-to-date information that individual guides like this one deliberately leave to the organisers. To understand where the field the society serves is heading, you may also enjoy our look at emerging trends in geospatial science.