From March 25 to 28, 2026, the FOSSGIS Conference, the annual conference of the German-speaking community for free geoinformation systems and OpenStreetMap, took place in Göttingen. This year, the Green Delivery Analytics project participated online. The program covered a remarkable range of topics: from municipal IT strategies and cadastral digitization to bicycle traffic sensors and methods of spatiotemporal data aggregation.
A recurring theme throughout the conference was the issue of digital sovereignty. Several presentations and a panel discussion on data storage and process security in the cloud highlighted that sovereignty is less a matter of location and more a matter of decision-making authority. Open standards were identified as a key factor in this context, although they are not necessarily synonymous with open source. The presentations by the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy and the Federal Environment Agency, which introduced their respective open data and open source strategies, demonstrated that progress is being made in this area.
Several technical points of connection emerged for the project’s work. A case study on the use of the Valhalla routing engine in conjunction with the MapLibre Navigation SDK addressed issues that are also relevant to the system architecture of Green Delivery Analytics. Two additional presentations examined the reliability of OpenStreetMap data as a basis for routing and reached a positive assessment for the European region, although they also identified a need for improvement regarding data timeliness. In addition, discrete global grid systems were presented as a method for spatial aggregation. These are particularly important when dealing with datasets subject to data protection regulations.
One overarching observation is the remarkable openness of the FOSSGIS community. Technical knowledge is willingly shared, even in highly specialized fields. For a research project that regularly operates in such niche areas, this exchange represents significant added value and provides a solid foundation for further networking.