International activities and commitments

A collaboration between all the arctic countries to establish a seamless application for viewing maps of the arctic area. The Norwegian Mapping authority is a Board member, National Contact Point for Norway and participates in the working groups for Communication, Strategy, Technical issues, Geoportal, and Cloud and Cascading Services.

The Norwegian Mapping Authority's Geodetic Institute contributes to the project whose aim is to develop the first pan-European satellite navigation system.

The Norwegian Mapping Authority's Geodetic Institute is involved in and contributes to several projects, among others as partner in the project "Arctic Test Bed", whose aim is to contribute to extending secure satellite navigation in the Arctic. The Institute has a research group which monitors a large network of ground sensors for measuring conditions in the ionosphere, the outermost layer of the atmosphere.

We participate actively in working groups and knowledge networks for Business Interoperability, Cadastre and Land Registry, Emergency Mapping, Policy, Quality and INSPIRE.

Norway is a member delegate of EuroSDR, a collaboration between the mapping authorities in Europe on research and development in the area of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI).

The global navigation satellite system (GNSS) created by the EU and ESA in order to provide an alternative high-precision positioning system upon which European nations can rely, independently from the Russian GLONASS and US GPS systems. Norway joined the programme in 2009 and it is one of the Norwegian Mapping Authority's main goals that our contributions (both to EGNOS and Galileo) always meet the standard Norwegian requirements for performance, and assist public and private authorities with quality assurance of GNSS-based navigation services.

ICA is the world's leading body for cartography; a discipline that deals with the understanding, production, dissemination and study of maps. ICA hosts a biannual cartography conference which is the largest cartographic event where you can keep abreast of developments within the discipline. The Norwegian Mapping Authority has represented ICA Norway since 1998, and also leads the board of directors for Geoforum, which has a national membership in ICA.

IAG and GGOS together form a Consortium which is responsible for developing and promoting a global geodetic reference frame. While the Norwegian Mapping Authority is responsible for compiling data for the whole of Norway, we also contribute Norwegian data towards this international consortium, so that actors in need of cross-border, international data can make use of seamless data. The Norwegian Mapping authority is approved by GGOS internationally as a centre of competence for VLBI, SLR and IVS.

81 countries are members, and Norway is represented by the Norwegian Mapping Authority, through participation and capacity building in 15 committees, working groups and regional Hydrographic Commissions working on the development of international policies and standards.

It is an important part of the European eGovernment programme. The work is divided into several parts and actions. The Norwegian Mapping Authority follows with interest some of the programme, and is active in the working group on spatial information and services.

It is the technical committee of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) responsible for developing International Standards in the field of geographic information and geomatics. More than 60 standards are published in this domain. The Norwegian Mapping Authority has the chair of the committee, and is also convening one of the working groups, WG4 Geospatial services. The secretariat of the committee is with Standards Norway.

The Norwegian Mapping Authority's Geodetic Institute has a long history of cooperation with NASA, not least with knowledge exchange for our geodetic earth observatory in Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard, which is part of the international network of earth observatories playing a key role in the frames of reference and global cooperation on monitoring of the globe.

The Norwegian Mapping Authority coordinates a regional cooperation for the delivery of official electronic navigational charts (ENC) of Norwegian and several other European countries' waters. Cooperating countries include 12 National Hydrographic Offices (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Norway, Russia, Mozambique and Sweden) and other countries which participate in distribution agreements: Canada, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Ukraine and the United States. PRIMAR also distributes data from countries that are members of the English Regional ENC Coordinating Center (RENC). The charts meet the requirements set by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and in accordance with specifications given by the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO). 

The Statistics Norway, The Norwegian Tax Administration, the Brønnøysund Register Centre and the Norwegian Mapping Authority are working together on developing a joint approach in their effort of sharing experiences and offering support to developing countries in improving their core administrative registers and making better use of administrative data for statistics. The cooperation officially began in February 2017 with an agreement on cooperation, and the first activities have included cooperation in development projects in Sudan.

More on cooperation with UN initiatives can be found on link above.