Geoinformatics

Become a high-skilled geospatial professional

BECOME AN EXPERT IN DEVELOPING TECHNOLOGIES REQUIRED FOR ANALYSING, DISTRIBUTING, AND VISUALISING GEOSPATIAL DATA

Big geospatial data play an important role in today’s societal major challenges: in improving agricultural practices to enhance sustainable crop production, monitoring air pollution in urban areas, inventing water scarcity solutions, or designing smart-city infrastructure through the use of more efficient public transport facilities. It is a matter of capturing, classifying, analysing, processing, and visualising the data to be able to apply it in order to tackle these local and global challenges. The specialisation in Geoinformatics teaches you to develop algorithms, models, and tools to process geo-information into actionable insights.

Wan Bakx, specialisation coordinator Geoinformatics.

This specialisation is different from the others as your focus will be on developing new models and algorithms. As a Geoinformatics alumnus, you can quickly grasp the needs from, for example, an urban planning and management specialist who isn’t a spatial modelling or image analysis expert and design and implement an appropriate solution together.

Wan Bakx, specialisation coordinator Geoinformatics.

Master's Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation

Go to registration!

What is geoinformatics?

How can you make sense of the massive amounts and diversity of geospatial data available from, for example, satellites, UAVs, radar, and laser scanning? How can you construct custom algorithmic solutions and other AI methods to address real-life geospatial problems? For example, building a model that predicts where pollen allergies will occur in the Netherlands, so decision-makers can warn the general public via apps? Or optimising accessibility to hospitals by bike? In the specialisation in Geoinformatics, you will gain the necessary programming knowledge and skills to acquire, retrieve, clean, and explore various geospatial datasets to create maps, models, systems, and graphics that help other stakeholders make better-informed decisions.

Examples of courses you will follow during this specialisation:
  • Turnkey software systems for geo-information science and earth observation are functionally powerful but don’t provide an instant solution to each problem. In the course Scientific Geocomputing, you will learn to construct custom algorithmic solutions to specific geospatial problems.
  • Acquiring, cleaning, and exploration of geospatial data before you start with the actual analysis is at the core of scientific research and you will learn the techniques to do that in the course Acquisition and Exploration of Geospatial Data.
  • In the course Extraction, Analysis and Dissemination of Geospatial Information, you will learn methods to extract objects from images and blocks and to apply appropriate visualisation principles for web services and mapping clients.

Thanks to the state-of-the-art geoscience labs, visualisation and usability labs, UAV centre, and satellite and sensor databases available at ITC, you will gain hands-on experience and work on real-life problems and solutions: for example, you might develop a solution that models how drones can automatically find the entrance of a building for urban search and rescue during a disaster. What’s more, the specialisation allows you to focus more on Earth observation or geo-information processing. It prepares you for research in many research groups but especially ACQUAL and STAMP. If you want to focus on Earth observation, your research connects very well with the research group ACQUAL, and you may work on use cases such as estimating crop yield, soil fertility, and crop disease to help farmers improve crop production. A geo-information focus is linked with research within the research group STAMP, and you may, for example, use street view images and Twitter data to model crime rates in neighbourhoods.

What will you learn?

As a graduate of the Master's in Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation with a specialisation in Geoinformatics, you have acquired specific scientific knowledge, skills, and values that will help you in your future career.

Knowledge

After completing this Master’s specialisation, you:

Skills

After successfully finishing this Master’s specialisation, you:

Values

After completing this Master’s specialisation, you:

Other Master's and specialisations

Is this specialisation not exactly what you are looking for? Maybe one of the other specialisations suits you better. You can also find out more about related Master’s at the University of Twente: