August 07, 2006

Notes from the open session at ESRI UC 26

Like James indicated, it’s a bit tough to blog in detail, live from within the session hall, however, I can get you some of the points and highlights of things we’ve been hearing about so far today.

13,500 professionals from 127 countries taking the stage here in the conference. These are GIS professionals from a variety of disciplines. To start Jack asked us all to meet someone news (as he does every year). The week ahead we were reminded is all about sharing and communication

What we all do:
To kick off the presentation Jack has been going through a reminder of what exactly we all do and providing some amazing examples of uses and users of GIS and ESRI solutions.
logistics, security, public safety, conservation, emergency response. Etc…
Last year recall Hurricane Katrina put many GIS users to work in a tragic, real life emergency. Many people here at the UC were involved and working on the response.
Global change, planning, public safety and E911, homeland security, business geographics, telecommunications and infrastructure planning/management, agriculture, mining… geography in education, health
Applications are considering geography as a whole

Special achievement in GIS awards have been handed out to some 100+ ESRI power users.
Making a difference award -- National informatics center of India – built a national infrastructure. Dr. Sharma was greeted and introduced to us on the stage

Also… special achievent award – NGA – Lt. Gen James Clapper

President’s Ward – OS, Britain
“Built one of the most successful GIS’s I’ve ever seen” (Dangermond) – a complete geospatial org! An ambitious undertaking launched in 2001 –completed early and under budget (OS MasterMAp) – million+ featured Updates inn the DB take place withing 6 months of the landscape changing

Meeting the challenges that face us:
Greater human understanding
Sense of responsibility
The courage and will to act
Collaborative efforts
Strong leadership

GIS enables us to make a difference and provides us with a new medium for understanding and modeling our World. Provides for intuitive visualization, helps us create order and meaning of the planet and understand nature and ecology. GIS influences how we do things and how we reaspond. It provides us with with the ability to build a common understanding. We can author and share our geographic knowledge. The web is now geographically enabled with many services, and users. The future web will evolve to be a great collaborative tool with many users and authors. … GeoWeb. Google and Microsoft have introduced tools that provide a new way of interacting and seeing. GIS on the web creates many possibilities for sharing geographic knowledge… share maps, data, analysis, Globes, metadata… this will create a whole new way of thinking that is open and interoperable. Individual systems and communities will use each other’s services… sharing content freely and interoperability are key.

The ESRI Development Process
9.2 is the biggest and most productive release yet – some 1000 person years
Attention to quality, and documentation
Better quality and productivity – thousand sof bugs fixed, better documentation, more content and a new way of documentation. Focus on support for 3 diff categories of standards making it a truly open platform – support for OGC and ISO standards.. and support for DXF and KML.. more on that later..

ArcGIS Technology – using the web as a platform.. new clients for Mobile, Web map, and Explorer. Desktop tools will be more stable and much new functionality rolled into extensions. Better attribute edition, integration with CAD, COGO support, and new data models.

Animation and visualization – enhanced 3D visualization and temporal analysis and modeling
New tools, extending the geodatabase model (ie. A new terrain surface XYZ data structure) provides for ability to siplay additional detail as you zoom into your data.
Improving arcGIS server for raster data management
Image server to be packaged with ArcGIS Server – on the fly processing of imagery on the server… much faster raster processing and display on the web.

Open access to the Geodatabase using SQL
Introduction of history fields (ideal for managing land records)

ArcIMS 9.2 – new webmap viewer, .Net and Java integration
ArcGIS Server is a new platform – now a complete comprehensive server-based system; out of the box services, simple to install, scalable, high performance, interoperable, affordable. – no longer simply a developer application (.net and java flavors).

New licensing of ArcGIS Server – make what you do more available – think taking your data and drag/drop/serve
Advanced – geopreocessing and editing
Standard – mapping and visualization
Basic – data management

ArcGIS Explorer is getting loads of airtime and has been on the screens quite a bit this morning - ass we likely expected. Once available (date?) this free client should be a very powerful tool, enabling not only simple viewing but users can actually perform spatial apps and real "GIS" using it! Support for SHP and KML data is provided as is the support for a number of raster data formats... sewwt. Some of the Globes and templates that will be available for all are spectacular to say the least... imaging your very own Globe using National Geographic quality cartographic data... that's what you'll have with arcGIS Explorer... and much more.

Gotta go get some lunhc and, as luck would have it, I have multiple offers comming inn on the house today so I'm also communicating with the realtor and my wife while I blog fromm the session... can you say Multi-tasking!!!! Later ;0) (PS: sorry about any typos!)

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