ISPRS Geospatial Week 2025 is the newest chapter in a well-established tradition of co-located scientific workshops, but many newcomers still ask a simple question: what exactly is ISPRS Geospatial Week? This overview explains the event's purpose, its history, its biennial rhythm, and its role in the wider photogrammetry and remote sensing community.

What Is ISPRS Geospatial Week?

ISPRS Geospatial Week is a recurring scientific event organised under the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Its defining characteristic is co-location: rather than being a single conference, it is a coordinated cluster of specialised workshops that share the same dates and venue. Each workshop focuses on a particular slice of the geospatial field, such as LiDAR, point cloud processing, 3D reconstruction, mobile mapping or image analysis, and each maintains its own scientific committee and paper track. By gathering these workshops together, Geospatial Week creates a critical mass of expertise while preserving the depth and focus that specialists value.

For a broader introduction that also covers registration and program logistics, see our complete guide to ISPRS Geospatial Week 2025.

The Purpose Behind ISPRS Geospatial Week

The core purpose of Geospatial Week is to advance the science and application of spatial data by bringing closely related research communities into the same room. Many of the fields ISPRS covers overlap heavily: a researcher working on autonomous vehicle perception may draw on point cloud processing, SLAM, sensor fusion and deep learning simultaneously. Traditional single-topic conferences can silo these communities. The Geospatial Week model deliberately breaks down those silos, encouraging researchers to attend adjacent sessions, form new collaborations, and see their own work in a wider context. This cross-pollination is arguably the event's greatest contribution to the field.

A Brief History of ISPRS Geospatial Week

Geospatial Week emerged from the ISPRS community's desire for a more agile, focused counterpart to its large quadrennial Congress. Over successive editions it has been hosted in different cities around the world, each time assembling a fresh combination of workshops reflecting the community's evolving priorities. In earlier editions the emphasis was strongly on laser scanning and photogrammetry; more recent editions have increasingly featured machine learning, deep learning for remote sensing, and the integration of geospatial data with emerging application domains. This adaptability is a deliberate design feature: because the workshop line-up can change from edition to edition, Geospatial Week stays closely aligned with the current research frontier. For details on the society steering this evolution, read our guide about the ISPRS society.

How the Workshops Co-Locate

The co-location model is worth understanding in a little more detail, because it shapes the entire attendee experience. In a typical Geospatial Week:

  • Several independent workshops are proposed and selected by the organising committee, each led by domain experts.
  • The workshops run in parallel tracks over the course of the week, sharing common facilities.
  • Plenary and keynote sessions are shared across all workshops, providing common intellectual touchpoints.
  • A single registration typically grants access across workshops, so attendees can move freely between sessions.
  • Accepted papers are published together in the ISPRS Annals or ISPRS Archives.

This structure means a delegate can build a personalised schedule that crosses workshop boundaries, following a research thread wherever it leads. For a closer look at how a typical week is arranged, see our article on the GSW 2025 program and themes.

The Biennial Nature of Geospatial Week

Geospatial Week is generally held on a biennial basis, meaning it recurs roughly every two years. This cadence sits deliberately between the annual rhythm of many specialist conferences and the four-year cycle of the ISPRS Congress. The biennial schedule gives the community enough time to produce substantial new research between editions, while remaining frequent enough to keep pace with a fast-moving field. Because exact scheduling can vary, anyone planning to attend a specific edition, including the 2025 one, should confirm the dates on the official ISPRS Geospatial Week 2025 website rather than relying on an assumed calendar. We explain the difference in cadence more fully in Geospatial Week vs the ISPRS Congress.

Its Role in the Geospatial and Photogrammetry Community

Within the photogrammetry and remote sensing community, Geospatial Week has become an important fixture for several reasons. It offers a respected, peer-reviewed publication venue through the ISPRS Annals and Archives. It provides a meeting point for academia, industry and public-sector mapping agencies. It surfaces emerging methods, from new sensor technologies to novel deep-learning architectures, well before they become mainstream. And it plays a mentoring role, with tutorials and short courses that help early-career researchers enter the field. In this sense Geospatial Week functions not only as a conference but as a recurring anchor for the community's shared knowledge and relationships.

Who Takes Part?

Participants range from senior professors and established industry engineers to first-year doctoral students presenting their first paper. The event attracts sensor manufacturers, software developers, national mapping and cadastral agencies, and researchers from adjacent disciplines such as robotics, environmental science and urban planning. If you are wondering whether your role fits, our guide on who should attend Geospatial Week 2025 offers concrete guidance for different professions and career stages.

How Geospatial Week Differs from a Standalone Workshop

It is worth clarifying why Geospatial Week is more than simply a big workshop. A standalone workshop draws only the specialists already committed to its narrow topic. Geospatial Week, by co-locating several such workshops, creates spillover: someone attending for point cloud processing may stumble into a compelling talk on deep learning for imagery, or strike up a conversation with a mobile-mapping researcher over lunch. The shared keynotes lift everyone's gaze to the field's larger questions, and the shared exhibition and social program multiply the chances for serendipitous connection. The result is an event whose value exceeds the sum of its individual workshops, which is exactly the point of the co-location model.

The Value of Attending in Person

In an age of online proceedings and virtual talks, some may ask why the community continues to gather physically for Geospatial Week. The answer lies in what happens between the formal sessions. Live demonstrations of new sensors, spontaneous discussions after a provocative talk, the forming of new collaborations at a poster board, and the informal mentoring of students all depend on people being in the same place. For many researchers, the connections made at Geospatial Week prove as valuable over the following years as the papers presented. This is a recurring theme across editions and a strong reason the event endures.

Past Editions in General Terms

While we avoid stating unverified specifics, it is fair to say that past editions of Geospatial Week have been held in a variety of host countries and have consistently combined a handful of parallel workshops with shared keynotes, tutorials and an exhibition component. Each edition has produced a body of open-access proceedings that remains a valuable reference. Reviewing the proceedings of earlier editions is one of the best ways to understand the scope, quality and style of the event before attending or submitting to the 2025 edition.

Learning More About Geospatial Week 2025

ISPRS Geospatial Week has earned its place as a focused, community-driven counterpart to the broader ISPRS Congress. If this overview has sparked your interest, the natural next steps are to explore the expected key topics of Geospatial Week 2025, and to confirm the official dates, venue and registration arrangements at ISPRS.org and the official ISPRS Geospatial Week 2025 website before making any plans.