Established in the Netherlands in 2007, GeoCat offers cutting-edge, customized software and services that make publishing geospatial data on the Internet easier and more efficient than ever. We operate in the fast-growing market of Spatial Data Infrastructure and geospatially-enabled technologies. Sustainable applications We build sustainable, evolving applications following the Free and Open Source Software philosophy and open standards. We have provided successful consulting services and products that contributed to the development of National Spatial Data Infrastructures for The Netherlands, Swiss, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Scotland, ESA and many others.

Our products GeoNetwork opensource (the leading open source Geospatial Catalog application) and GeoCat Bridge (software for one click data publishing) in combination with the OpenGeo Suite offer the most cost-effective and comprehensive Spatial Data Infrastructure toolset available today.

GeoCat founder

GeoCat was founded by Jeroen Ticheler in 2007. Ticheler studied Tropical Forestry at Wageningen University specialising in GIS and Remote Sensing. Following graduation in 1997, he worked for the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome for almost ten years.

Ticheler held various positions in GIS/remote sensing and established the GeoNetwork opensource project. The FAO GeoNetwork is the first implementation based on this software, releasing a large quantity of geospatial data to the public. Today GeoNetwork opensource is accepted as the definitive open source geospatial catalogue application with implementations from project to international level. From 2007-2009, Ticheler served on the Board of Directors of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). He is a strong fan and supporter of OSGeo and its yearly FOSS4G conferences.

Ticheler has been promoting the use of international standards and Free and Open Source Software for geographic data and information ever since he started working on GeoNetwork opensource. He truly believes in sharing knowledge:

I want to make technologies for publishing geospatial data on the internet available to every organization, no matter how big or small. It is wonderful to see how easy it can be to publish geospatial data on the internet and how knowledge sharing can accelerate innovation.

Other initiatives started by Ticheler:

• The OpenSDI to instigate the development of a FOSS based SDI software stack.
• The United Nations Spatial Data Infrastructure UNSDI process. It started, in 2005, with a small workshop named the UNSDI Workshop, although it was better known within the FAO as the second GeoNetwork workshop.
• He participated in writing the UNSDI Reference Architecture document that can be downloaded from the UNGIWG website.