EMIS s.r.o. joined NEREUS recently as an Associate member. In the following interview we will explore the role of the organisation and why it was important to join NEREUS.
- Can you introduce EMIS s.r.o. and share a few words about your organization, its mission, and its role in Slovakia and Europe? What distinguishes EMIS from other organizations working in geospatial solutions and data management, and where do you see your main strengths?
EMIS is a company based in Trnava, Slovakia, with more than 20 years of expertise in GIS, focused on the development of geospatial software products.
EMIS’s mission has not changed since the first day: to close the distance between the enormous volume of geospatial data now available and the decisions people actually have to make with it. EMIS does that through three platforms: ESID System for property and infrastructure asset management for state agencies and large infrastructure administrators; MAPSFY, a map portal used by more than 500 municipalities; Geovio for remote sensing analysis for scientists in the Earth and atmosphere domains.
What distinguishes EMIS is the customer relationship rather than the technology. EMIS develops with its users, therefore, our solutions fit local realities: Slovak cadastral practice, municipal tax agendas, national road and rail asset registers. Our main strength follows from that: we make Earth observation usable by organizations that have no GIS specialists.
- How do you interact and cooperate with regional and national public authorities in Slovakia? What mechanisms, partnerships, or initiatives support collaboration between EMIS and public administrations in the field of geospatial data and digital transformation?
Through three channels, in practice.
First, direct service relationships with national and regional bodies. Our clients include the Slovak Road Administration, the National Motorway Company, the Railways of the Slovak Republic, the Bratislava Water Company, regional self-governments, and more than 500 cities, towns, and villages.
Second, the institutions of the municipal ecosystem itself. We work with DEUS, the Data Centre for the Electronization of Local Governments of Slovakia, and with ZMOS, the Association of Towns and Municipalities of Slovakia; the channel through which Slovak municipalities collectively organize their digitalization. MAPSFY displays tax payer data over land registers allowing for precise taxation with immediate monetary benefit, and urban development with taxation in mind.
Third, publicly funded innovation programs. IGES, the Intelligent Geospatial Ecosystem of Slovakia, was financed by Slovakia’s Recovery and Resilience Plan and ran from October 2025 to June 2026; we presented it at the national assembly of ZMOS and to the Trnava Self-Governing Region. Earlier, two research projects under the Operational Program Integrated Infrastructure 2014–2020 developed advanced geo-analytical tools for remote sensing and methods for optimizing the collection and distribution of primary spatial data.
- EMIS works with spatial data, cadastral information, and advanced analytics. Could you share examples or figures illustrating how your work has contributed to the development of Slovakia’s space ecosystem, public services, or regional innovation in recent years?
The clearest figure is reach. More than 500 Slovak cities and municipalities use our services. Roughly half of them have fewer than 1,000 inhabitants and a third between 1,000 and 5,000. Precisely the administrations that commercial geospatial products normally skip. Through MAPSFY they have access to over 1,000 digitized zoning plans, more than 200 public layers and web map services, and current and historical cadastral data.
On the space side, IGES brought Sentinel-2 imagery with a monthly archive, digitized zoning plans and change analysis directly into municipal hands. It is built on Copernicus data and shaped continuously by user feedback, and it has been presented at the EGU General Assembly in Vienna, at ESA’s Earth Observation Commercialization Forum and at the World Urban Forum.
In October 2025 we announced a partnership with ICEYE to add a SAR-derived flood layer for near real-time monitoring in Slovakia, and we work with Planet to strengthen the analytics behind Geovio. In agriculture, our agro.mapsfy.com solution was awarded the “Zlatý kosák” prize by the Slovak Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
- How do you position geospatial technologies and data-driven solutions within the broader innovation ecosystem in Slovakia? What are the unique strengths and specificities of your organization and your regional environment?
Slovakia’s space ecosystem is young and carries no large institutional legacy, so the value we add is not in building satellites but in making their data ordinary: something a municipal officer opens in a browser on a Tuesday morning.
Our regional environment shaped that position. Slovakia has roughly 2,900 municipalities, the great majority of them very small. That fragmentation is usually described as a weakness. For us it became a design constraint that turned into an advantage: it forced us to build products that assume no GIS staff, no server room and no procurement capacity; and those are exactly the products that Europe’s underserved local governments need.
The second specificity is data. Slovakia maintains unusually complete national registers: the cadaster, the register of addresses, and since May 2024 the Statistical Register of Buildings, Houses and Dwellings, maintained continuously by the municipalities themselves. Combining well-kept registers with Copernicus imagery is where the real analytical value appears, and it is where we concentrate.
- According to your experience, how important are space technologies, Earth observation data, and geospatial information for innovation, research, and regional development? How does EMIS integrate these technologies into its solutions, and what opportunities do you see for their future development?
They have become indispensable, mainly because they changed the economics of evidence. What a region once had to survey on the ground, at high cost and low frequency, it can now observe repeatedly from orbit.
In Geovio we combine free Sentinel and Landsat imagery, viewable without processing fees, with commercial tasking from Planet, ICEYE, SatVu and others, and with drone imagery; optical, multispectral, hyperspectral, thermal and SAR data in a single project. Concretely, that means classification of objects from optical imagery at up to 15 cm per pixel; five years of construction history for each municipality at 3 m per pixel, with very high resolution on demand within twelve hours; urban heat island mapping at 3 m per pixel with 2 °C sensitivity; greenery passports using tri-stereo imagery, NDVI and the Red Edge band; and SAR-derived flood depth and extent at the level of individual buildings and roads, with a first release within 24 hours of starting the analysis.
The opportunity ahead is as much regulatory as technical. European rules on building-stock energy performance, on high-value datasets and on housing statistics are turning spatial evidence from a nice-to-have into a legal obligation.
- One of the key activities of NEREUS is to promote cooperation between regions, organizations, and stakeholders across Europe. How do you see the added value of interregional collaboration and partnerships for EMIS, particularly in areas such as geospatial data, digital transformation, smart cities, and sustainable development?
The problem we work on is not Slovak; it is structural across Europe. Most municipalities below 10,000 inhabitants have no geospatial expert. Copernicus data is available to them, but the organizational competence to use it is not — a gap the Interreg SATSDIFACTION project has documented well. The integration of satellite data into regional Spatial Data Infrastructures remains far from optimal in many NEREUS regions. And regions that have committed to EU climate goals frequently cannot produce the spatial evidence to demonstrate progress on heat reduction, vegetation cover or land-use change.
Because the problem repeats, the solution travels. A service proven with Slovak municipalities can be adapted to another region’s cadaster, language and rules far faster than it can be rebuilt from scratch; and interregional cooperation is what makes that transfer a shared exercise rather than a purely commercial one.
It also runs in the other direction. We learn from Veneto’s work on regional data infrastructures, from Emilia-Romagna on climate resilience, from Podkarpackie on agricultural land-use monitoring. Partnerships of that kind are how a company of our size gains a European perspective without pretending to have European scale.
- Why did you decide to join the NEREUS Network? Have you had any previous experience with NEREUS or with European cooperation initiatives related to space, Earth observation, or geospatial technologies?
We joined as an Associate Member in 2026 and took part in the General Assembly in April.
The reason was straightforward. NEREUS is the one European platform where regional public authorities, our actual users, set the agenda on space applications, instead of the space industry setting it for them. For a downstream company that builds for local government, that is simply the right space to be in.
European cooperation was not new to us. Our products are built on Copernicus: IGES runs on Sentinel-2 data. We carried out two research projects under the Operational Program Integrated Infrastructure 2014–2020. We are members of Open & Agile Smart Cities, and we have taken part in EUSPA’s User Consultation Platform, ESA’s Living Planet Symposium in Vienna, ESA’s EO Commercialization Forum and the ESA SME Forum, the EGU General Assembly and the World Urban Forum.
- How would you like to use the NEREUS platform? Are there any specific activities, projects, expertise, or innovative solutions that EMIS would like to share with the NEREUS community?
Three things, concretely.
First, the Earth Observation and Copernicus Working Group. We would like to contribute with a webinar on how space-based services can support local and regional authorities on urban climate adaptation and flood resilience.
Second, the 5th European Symposium in Bologna in October 2026. The business-to-government matchmaking and the call for solutions to regional space data challenges match very closely what we do, and we intend to respond.
Third, and most important, pilots. We would like to run short pilots with NEREUS regions: two or three municipalities, three to six months, a specific problem the region has already published, and a working environment that we set up so the region can simply test it rather than procure it.
What we can offer the community is a fairly rare specialism: what it actually takes to deploy geospatial and Earth observation services to very small municipalities and have them used in daily work. We would gladly co-author a Copernicus4Regions user story with any region that runs a pilot with us.
- Looking ahead, what are the main opportunities and challenges you see for the use of geospatial data, artificial intelligence, and space-based technologies in supporting better decision-making across European regions?
The largest opportunity is that European regulation is turning spatial evidence into an obligation. The recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive requires national databases on the energy performance of the building stock; the high-value datasets regulation requires buildings and addresses to be published free of charge through APIs and bulk download; and forthcoming European statistics on population and housing will require near-annual outputs. Regions will need working services, not further studies. Artificial intelligence helps on the other side of the same equation, lowering the cost of processing imagery so that analysis stops being the bottleneck.
The challenges are less technological than organizational. The real constraint is competence: data is abundant, the capacity to use it is not. Spatial data infrastructures remain fragmented, so evidence is hard to assemble across administrative borders. Small municipalities cannot run IT procurements, which means solutions have to arrive as services rather than as software. And pilots funded by grants tend to die when the grant ends, so any long-term deployment must test an operating model and not only a technology.
Trust is the last one. Combining public registers with Earth observation is powerful, and it demands clear and public rules on confidentiality.
