Esri announces that it will partner with Next Century, a decision support company based in Columbia, Maryland, to develop Esri map widgets for the Ozone Widget Framework (OWF). Next Century has been the prime developer of OWF since its beginning. OWF allows the rapid development of specialized web capabilities and was originally used in defense and intelligence systems. The U.S. government has released OWF as open-source software to foster its further use in state and local governments, healthcare, and other markets.
“This strategic relationship with Next Century provides Esri with decision support expertise of particular value to our defense/intelligence customers,” says Jeff Peters, Esri’s Director, National government. “The development and deployment of Ozone map widgets is critical to the military for command center operations.”
”Esri’s decision to develop OWF widgets is a huge win for the IC and military community who depend heavily on Esri’s products and are committed to using OWF. It is also a big win for the government, who funded the development of OWF, since Esri’s products are used worldwide. In my book, that’s the definition of WIN-WIN,” says John McBeth, Next Century’s President and CEO.
The relationship will produce widgets that will be made available to developers via open source communities. In addition to map widgets, the Esri and Next Century team will build a sample application demonstrating how to interact with them from other widgets. The focus will be on information synthesis and the support of report generation. Widgets developed will connect with the ArcGIS platform, allowing users to make use of Esri’s high-end services, tools, and workflows through the Ozone Widget Framework environment.
Ozone mapping widget features will include :
– Identification, creation and sharing of layers
– Editing and drawing features on the map
– Providing custom location markers (i.e. pins) for identified points of interest
– Geocoding
– Identification of selected features via broadcast to other listening widgets
– Drag and drop of data as rows or small sets of data items
About Next Century
Next Century is a technology company focused on the development of a new class of solutions that include situational awareness, at-a-glance analysis, decision support, collaboration, and other means to provide information to decision makers in ways that are highly intuitive and actionable. We rely heavily on our expertise in the key areas of geographic information systems (GIS), image exploitation, mobile computing, wireless networks, visualization, and user interface design to develop these solutions. Our business focuses on the industries of healthcare, national security, and corporate security with particular specialization in homeland security, the military, and intelligence. For more information, visit www.nextcentury.com.
About Esri
Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS technology, Esri software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. Esri is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at esri.com/news.
