Eric Bayers

Prime delegate Belgium


Short biography

Eric is advisor-geographer at the National Geographic Institute of Belgium (NGI). He is currently director of the SDI department (Spatial Data Infrastructure). Eric has a master of Geography from the university of Liège. Eric joined the NGI in 1990 as a young geographer in charge of setting up GIS tools for the production of digital cartographic data. Eric then successively, joined the remote sensing unit of the NGI to produce the Corine Land Cover data and participated in the expert group INSPIRE "data specification”. Eric then became Director of Cartography and then Director of Photogrammetry, before taking over SDI management.

During all these years at NGI, Eric has acquired skills in training management, project management PMI and public management (Eric has a executive master in public management from the Solvay Brussels School). Eric is also a research associate from ULiège (University of Liège) in the field of geomatics and member of the AM-FM / GIS BeLux  board.

From 2016 to 2018, Eric was president of EuroSDR.


About the National Geographic Institute

The National Geographic Institute (NGI) is the national mapping agency of Belgium. It’s main mission is to make available complete spatial reference data covering the whole Belgian territory and of homogeneous quality for the citizens, the authorities and the private sector. NGI is also in charge of developing the national spatial data infrastructure. NGI is the recognized geospatial information broker in Belgium where stakeholders can readily benefit from the provision and use of geographic information.

  • Organisation: Institut Géographique National / Nationaal Geografisch Instituut
  • Contact: eric.bayers@ngi.be