As part of its data production workflows, the IGN (the French National Mapping Agency) has developped many QGIS plugins that can be of interest to the QGIS community and we have created QGIS Plugin to ease the access to services of the Geoplateforme

• Géoservices :

  • The GPF Isochrone–Isodistance–Routing plugin brings Géoplateforme’s mobility services into QGIS, offering fast isochrone, distance, and routing calculations. IGN supervised its development with Oslandia.
  • The French Locator Filter adds high‑quality French geocoding to QGIS using the Géoplateforme API. IGN funded the feature and coordinated the subcontracting with Oslandia.

• Data production tools : A first plugin, “Espace co,” has recently become available; its purpose is to allow users to populate specialized collaborative databases, such as BDTopo (the French national database). It is available here : https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/ign_espace_collaboratif/

• Other plugins are currently under development, and we will strive to make them all available. A non-exhaustive list of what we plan to develop:

  • View plugin to have predefined styles based on data at your fingertips and to be able to share these styles among people working together.
  • Plugin for improved Z-axis management (visualization and correction) in QGIS
  • Plugin for managing lists of objects, saving them, and creating new ones…
  • Plugin for calculating the shortest path,
  • Plugin for digitization direction,

We are offering this presentation to explain our approach: why we chose to develop QGIS plugins and why we chose to make them available. We will present examples of use cases based on our own needs.

This presentation will allow us to gauge whether the QGIS community might be interested in these developments, potentially use them, and perhaps even contribute to them.

As a public agency, IGN has an obligation to publish in open format the data it produces and some of the code it develops. But our commitment to Open Source goes beyond giving access to the code produced and for more than ten years, IGN (the French map agency) has been engaged in creating Digital Commons, both in terms of data and in terms of code. In addition to contributing to well-known open-source libraries (pdal, gdal, etc.), our developers push a large part of their code on public repository on github. And, for some, we are working to build and animate a community of contributors and users.

In this conference, we will explain why a national mapping agency has chosen to adopt such an approach and why we believe Digital Commons are strategic to build a sustainable and collaborative future. We will give a quick overview of the code we are making open source and the organization that this involves (in particular, the creation of an Open Source Program Office - OSPO).

Finally, we will present our recent activities, organizational (internal drafting of guides, FAQs, etc.) and technical (new project and ongoing developments) and also contributions we can make with other organizations and companies involved in open source initiatives (notably participation in Tosit, a gathering of French companies focused on open source).

The Géoplateforme is the new national infrastructure for geographic data in France, designed to offer administrations a unified, scalable, and sovereign environment for storing, distributing, and visualising geospatial information. It provides a full suite of mutualized services—from secure hosting and high‑performance data distribution to ready‑to‑use visualization tools—that allow public bodies to focus on their missions rather than on infrastructure. On top of these core capabilities, the platform also delivers reference geocoding and reverse‑geocoding, altimetry services, and route and itinerary computation, making it a comprehensive ecosystem for producing and consuming geodata at national scale. This infrastructure guarantees sovereign and secure access to geographical data and maps without relying on Gafam services.

To build this platform, we relied heavily on open‑source technologies, combining mature, community‑driven components with tools specifically developed at IGN to meet national requirements.

Finally, we are committed to open‑sourcing the code behind our infrastructure and progressively sharing the building blocks that power the Géoplateforme and cartes.gouv.fr. Our strategy is not only to publish code, but to build a real community around it, inviting administrations, researchers, companies, and contributors to shape its evolution. By opening the doors to collaborative development, we aim to create a sustainable and transparent geospatial commons for France—one that grows through shared expertise, pooled investment, and a collective ambition to strengthen national geodata services through open innovation.

The rise of large language models is reshaping how we interact with information, and geographic data should be no exception. In this exploratory talk, we present IGN’s early work on a Geo‑Context MCP, a new interface designed to make France’s sovereign geodata directly accessible to AI agents. The goal is simple but ambitious: allow intelligent systems to query, understand, and reason over geographical data and OGC services—just as easily as humans do today.

We will walk through the first experiments that connect AI agents to WFS endpoints, structured geographic datasets, and other key services from the Géoplateforme. By exposing geodata through a machine‑native contextual layer, IGN aims to lower the barrier between spatial information and AI‑driven analysis. We hope this can open the door to new forms of automated geoprocessing, enriched decision‑making, and dynamic geospatial exploration.

Finally, this talk invites the community to imagine what comes next. IGN’s initiative is intentionally open, experimental, and collaborative—an invitation to researchers, developers, and public institutions to help prototype the future of Geo‑AI interaction. How can we make geodata more “intelligible” to agents ? Which tools, standards, or abstractions should we build together? This session is a first step toward that shared exploration.

IGN (French National Map Agency) and its partners are launching the JUNN project : A dynamic 3D digital replica of the territory with online services to interact with (visualization, immersive navigation, simulation). A tool that aims to federate data, technologies, communities and existing initiatives to collectively gain efficiency for the ecological transition.​

This digital twin of France and its territories is a tool-based approach, supported by a consortium of public and private players, enabling the development of a common Open-Source architecture built in support of identified business usescases.

Objectives are multiples:
* Reducing the cost of local initiatives and facilitate their replication in other areas,
* Establishing a framework for interoperability and interface between different projects
* Setting up a science platform to facilitate the development of technological advances from R&D,
* Building an ecosystem of services and business applications with high added value

The project will include 3D data production with 3D mesh data and CityGML LOD 2.2 data. The 3D meshes will be generated using the Wasure software (https://github.com/lcaraffa/sparkling-wasure), which was developed based on research conducted by the Lastig research laboratory. This software will be further refined during the project, in collaboration with INRIA and GeometryFactory.

Some of the CityGML data will also be produced by the IGN. Initial tests using the Open-Source Roofer software (https://github.com/3DBAG/roofer) have yielded promising results (https://batiment3d.ign.fr/) regarding what the Digital Twin data might look like.

This platform is intended to serve as a hub for scientific research, where it will be possible to connect simulators that have access to the platform’s extensive dataset. This will be the case, for example, with the ICI project (https://x-ngilet.gitlabpages.inria.fr/html_covici/index.html), which offers models of epidemic spread and whose access to the data will improve predictions

For visualization, we will use the open-source rendering engine iTowns (https://www.itowns-project.org/), to which IGN is a major contributor. Already high-performing, the close collaboration between the Digital Twin team and the iTowns development team will ensure that this tool is fully compatible with what we will be offering.

We are proposing this presentation to give the OSGeo community an overview of the project. This presentation will introduce the various open-source software components we will be using, some of which we will be enhancing (Wasure, iTowns, Rok4, Roofer, etc.).