There are now only three months to go until Australia’s largest geospatial conference, Locate, once again brings the community together.

Locate26 will be held in Melbourne from 24 to 26 November, and this year will be even more of a must-attend as it will be combined with a prestigious major international event, the 10th Digital Earth Summit of the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE).

The amalgamation of these two conferences means Australian delegates will get the best of both worlds — a strong program of local speakers, case studies, panels and workshops covering the whole gamut of geospatial developments, plus an equally strong program of international presentations from global experts.

While everyone knows how informative and beneficial Locate is every year, some might be less familiar with the ISDE, what it stands for and what it does.

So to find more about the organisation and how Locate26 and the Digital Earth Summit will synergistically blend together, we spoke with Prof Dr Zaffar Sadiq Mohamed-Ghouse, the convenor for the combined events.

Prof Dr Mohamed-Ghouse, Vice President and Director of Advisory & Innovation at Woolpert, needs no introduction for most members of Australia’s geospatial community, having long been a high-profile advocate for the geospatial profession both in Australia and overseas.

We began by asking him about the ISDE.

For those who don’t know, please tell us about the ISDE and what it does.

The International Society for Digital Earth is an international society that has been working for 20 years on the concept of a Digital Earth. Its president, Richard Simpson, is from Australia; he will be at the opening ceremony and will deliver the opening address. I serve on its council and I was the former vice president. I also represent the ISDE at the UN Global Geospatial Information Management Geospatial Societies and currently chair the 11 international societies. ISDE also has two highly respected journals with high impact factor: the International Journal of Digital Earth and the Big Earth Data Journal.

The ISDE is not new to Australia. Its Digital Earth Summit was held previously in Perth in 2011, and the 10th International Symposium on Digital Earth was held in Sydney in April 2017. That landmark event was jointly held alongside Locate17.

What exactly is meant by a ‘Digital Earth’?

It’s a concept that is intrinsic to Australians because we have the Digital Earth Australia built on these principles. The Queensland Globe is another sort of digital concept, as are the NSW Digital Twin, Victoria’s Digital Twin Platform and the Western Australia Digital Twin, part of the $140 million Spatial WA initiative led by Landgate..

The Digital Earth concept is looking into the representations of the Earth in its near-closed, virtual format. So that means, how do we take the near-real-world representation, bring in real time data, bring in digital twins, bring in dimensions of history (the 4th dimension), and the 5th dimension, which is the cost. The 6th dimension is about sustainability and energy efficiency. And the 7th dimension is how we sustain and maintain these assets.

We are envisaging that a lot of foreign delegates will come to the conference in Melbourne in November and bring their international experience, as they did in 2017. It will be very beneficial for Australians to see these international leaders and get their perspectives on how digital Earth concepts have taken a multi-dimensional approach.

Will there be any special local angles?

Absolutely. A major point of discussion will be the need for Australia to have its own sovereign capabilities. That’s why one of the panellists will be the CEO of an Australian start-up, Esper, which has hyperspectral Earth observation satellites. It will be amazing to see how the solutions they have gained from hyperspectral imagery, embedded with AI, are serving the mining industry.

And we’ll have an AI entrepreneur, CEO and founder of Enterprise Monkey, strategist, keynote speaker, and bestselling author from Geelong, who is working on agentic AI. He represented Australia on ‘AI for Good’ at the UN and just gave an outstanding presentation in Geneva at the International Telegraphic Union Congress.

And we’ll have many other local success stories, of course.

What will be the structure of the combined conferences?

We will have a lot of interactive plenary panels that will bring outstanding leaders, not just from the geospatial community, but also from artificial intelligence and from the space sector.

We will also have a dedicated Surveyor-General’s forum, a business forum for entrepreneurs, a young and emerging professionals forum, and a capacity building forum for discussing what’s next from here. There’ll also be a series of hands-on workshops.

We have carefully designed the plenaries to bring in different leadership from the government and private sectors, and professional representation as well. And the delegates will be able to interact with these leaders on the panels.

The opening plenary will be a kind of ‘Where to from here?’ and the closing plenary will be about the actions that were discussed during the event. If time permits, we might even produce a paper, a ‘Declaration of Locate,’ so that next year when we come back we will be able to judge what we have achieved.

Will it be broken into streams?

We will have dedicated streams for Digital Earth, a dedicated surveying stream, plus the normal Locate streams, throughout all of which people will talk about their experiences on projects or their personal reflections on how they have used geospatial, remote sensing and surveying technologies. And also we will have the Australasian Spatial Information Education and Research Association stream.

So the event will have a real synergy of the private sector, the government and the research community, all coming together and talking about current problems and the solutions to address those problems.

Can delegates attend all of the sessions?

Everyone can attend any session in any stream, and the plenaries as well; only one registration is needed. It’s all one integrated conference where everyone will benefit from the sharing of knowledge.

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Locate26 / 10th Digital Earth Summit at a glance

When: 24-26 November 2026

Where: Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre, Melbourne, Australia

Early bird registrations: Close on 31 August 2026

Web: www.locateconference.com.au

Program: https://willorganise-locate26-isde.eventsairsite.com/program-overview

Contact: Tel: +61 2 4319 8519 or info@locateconference.com.au

Spatial Source is proud to be the Official Media Partner for the Locate26/10th Digital Earth Summit event.