Archives for August 7, 2006

It’s always inpirational hearing from the kids and once again at the ESRI user conference the kids delivered. This year it was a group from the 4H youth organization that took center stage to show us all what they have accomplished and where they are going with GIS and geospatial technologies. This presentation likely drew the biggest and longest rounds of applause (as the kids usually do) as we saw images and heard details of how GIS and in particular, ESRI solutions are helping the non-profit youth organization solve a wide range of community problems and help initiate projects (like determining safety zones, parks planning, etc…). Hearing these stories always gets you motivated and I have no doubt that most of the people in the room were moved to at least think about how they could help a local orginazation or community group by offering up some skills or just a little bit of their own GIS knowledge and skills. Even keynote speaker Senator Bob Kerry made numerous references about the 4H kids and how such a smart and enthusastic group of kids makes him feel good and offers great promise for us (and the planet) moving forward… kudos to the 4H Group and I will definitely pass the word on that GIS professionals around the Globe are encouraged to offer up some help to a local non-profit like 4H. For more about 4H see this thread on the ESRI UC weblog

the crew at Carbon Project just informed me of their latest addition to the geo blogosphere… enter Carbon Cloud, a resource to keep you informed of the developments affecting the Carbon Project and all that interests them… Good luck! See http://carboncloud.blogspot.com/ and their latest post “Google blinds competition”

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!)

To get things rolling the video crew at ESRI
entertained us with a very cool montage of events
past, showing us snippets us video of presentaions and
conference moments from the past. Set to music it was
quite cool and showed loads of ESRI staffers behind
the scenes… these are the guys who make this huge
event all happen and typically run without a hitch…
nice job. JAck is now on the stage… later

Well, after a long and fun week-end here in San Diego
its time to get down to business so I’m now in the
mainn exhibition hall here at the convention center
waiting for the Monday kick-off session and keynote to
take place. Monday is always a real rush here as JAck
and crew take center stage to show off the latest
applications and give us a glimpse at the road ahead.
Today we’ll hear all about ArcGIS 9.2 and 9.x, ArcGIS
explorer should get some decent attention (my guess)
and I suspect we’ll likely hear loads about IMS and a
variety of web-enabling solution. Scott Moorehouse,
David MAguire, John Calkins, Clint Brown, and many
other key ESRI staffers will no doubt pump us all up
with their presentations as they always do. The room
is filling up quite fast already as people try to
squeeze innto the few vacant front row seats that are
still around. Back tracking a day or so, I had a
typical Saturday trip to the conference, although I
definitely had some good karma on the first leg of the
journey. A perfectly timed drop-off at the airport,
followed by a non-eventful but rapid process through
INS at the border. I then used my better instincts and
made my way to a monitor to see if there were any
earlier flights to San Diego. Low and behold there was
a 4:00 PM flight (just 45 minutes away). A jog to the
counter where I request switching flights is a no
brainer and easily done thanks to the good folks at
Alaska Air (this makes up for them inflicting some
serious damage on a perfectly good suitcase on a
recent flight from Denver!). I then decide to push my
luck even further and ask for an exit row seat as the
clerk prepares to issue me a boarding pass. He says to
me…. “I have one left and it’s a window seat too”!
Awesome… you gotta like it when things work out. So, a
fast, smooth flight out of Seattle takes us over a
smoldering Mt St. Helens (I kid you not) and I get in
to San Diego at 7:45 instead of 9:35… what a great
start. Sunday was bag pick up day and several of us
took in a ball game at Petco. the Padres won the game
in extra innings which led us to celebrate over at
Dick’s for the rest of the evening. An impromotu crowd
of us managed meet up at Dick’s where we had a fun but
productive evening greet-up and discussion of what we
expected over the next several days. I’ll leave you
now as things are about to get started here.