News

Over the past years, the federal geoportal has evolved into a key digital infrastructure for geospatial data. The year 2025 clearly shows that the importance of data use by external applications will continue to grow in the coming years.

Despite a solid foundation, the geoinformation industry appears to be growing too slowly. It is an «invisible niche» facing competition from the IT industry and location disadvantages. The report shows that visibility and attractiveness on the labour market should be increased.

The new action plan 2026 for the Swiss Geoinformation Strategy (SGS) is now available. It specifies the strategic roadmap and forms the basis for the action-oriented implementation in the coming year. In order to be able to react flexibly to current developments, implementation will follow the principle of rolling planning. The plan was officially approved by the Conference of Cantonal Geoinformation and Cadastral Survey Directors’ executive board and the Coordinating agency for Federal geographical information, GCG in December 2025.

How can maps be used creatively in the classroom? With the learning module “Art from Maps”, pupils discover how geography and art interact – and create their own works based on real geodata. The new teaching idea has just been published on schoolmaps.ch.

What does the name of a place mean? Where does it come from, and what was it called in the past? These were the questions addressed by sixth-grade students in the canton of Jura. Their project on toponymy — the study of the origin of geographical names — was documented in a video and published on schoolmaps.ch.

The previously offered INSPIRE ATOM/OpenSearch download services have been removed from the Federal Spatial Data Infrastructure (FSDI). The corresponding datasets remain fully available for download via the STAC API REST interface.