Under sunny skies and with 1600 registered users in attendance, the annual ESRI EMEA User Conference was held in London, UK last week at the Queen Elizabeth Convention Centre under the theme ‘GIS for everyday life’. Richard Waite, president of ESRI (UK) opened the show welcoming guests from across the globe. He said that this gathering was the largest European GIS conference by number in attendance as well as the largest in the country – “GIS is an indespensible part of life.”
Waite went on to explain that GIS was a well kept secret, focused too much on technology and not enough on the wealth it could generate. He explained that survey’s conducted by the company in the UK had shown time and again that users were looking for value from their GIS and that ESRI (UK) was often asked how to promote the technology within organisations in such a way that {sidebar id=249 align=right} value could be shown. “I’m asking all of you to consider how you can help others ot understand the power of GIS,” he asked in his opening remarks.
Jack Dangermond, founder and president of ESRI was next up. As could be expected, his message veered immediately into the power of GIS for bringing about change and contributing toward the solution of many of the world’s problems. “Bringing humans together is the power of GIS,” he exclaimed. Dangermond showed a particularly interesting slide of the mortgage and housing situation from his native southern California home. “You can see that many of the mortgage problems are far from the center of cities. This is because people bought houses further out reasoning they were cheaper at the time.” The GIS maps were actually telling the story of people who had bought homes on the basis of lower gasoline prices, reasoning travel was cheap. But, now that financial problems were present, they were augmented by higher transportation costs, a fact only GIS could show – which the maps revealed.
Dangermond then outlined the ESRI strategy based on desktop, server, mobile and online products. “Improving quality has been one of our greatest efforts over the last short while,” he said. He pointed to advancements in Geographic Science in terms of new {sidebar id=250 align=left}products such as the geostatistical analyst, proximity analysis, modelling, scatter plotting and weighted regression which have all been extending the power of GIS through higher levels of analytics. “We are developing 3D GIS at the moment and have completed considerable work on this front.” Dangermond considers ArcGIS Server the focal point of the company at moment because it represents the architecture most associated with a shift to online Web GIS initiatives and direction in society.
He openly spoke about mashups and the need to provide authoritative content for these purposes. A new emphasis with imagery has placed increasing cooperation with ITT Visual Information Systems, the maker’s of ENVI software, as a focus within the ESRI direction and the wider Web GIS environment and other applications. Indeed, 15m Landsat imagery is bundled together with ArcGIS 9.3 However, the real power of the ESRI/ITT Visual Information Systems cooperation lies in the automated extraction of useful information from imagery which can then be integrated directly into ArcGIS.
Few people are aware of the fact that ESRI is proposing to serve up geospatial data for free, provided those contributing data are willing to make it freely available to others. Dangermond mentioned this, and so far, Portugal has taken the company up on this opportunity. The ramifications for this are practical, since it places data directly near a high-end geo-processing engine. I raised this point to several INSPIRE presenter’s, who, will be providing much of their data across Europe freely, yet, who are faced with budget issues for hosting and maintaining servers of raw data alone.
{sidebar id=251 align=right} Timothy Mitchell of RSA Group, an insurance company, pointed to the recent flood issues in the UK and explained that GIS has an important role to play in terms of identifying vulnerable areas, but also in terms of helping companies and individuals to understand the issues of uncertainty in a broader sense. The recent floods in the country are not new. Mitchell directed the audience attention to surges, storms, floods and wave activity over the last few hundred year’s – all of which has resulted in damage and fatalities. Sheikh Nawaf Bin of Bahrain raised the question, “what should we do to raise awareness and capitalise upon the systems?” He was referring to the fact that many people look at GIS through a single lense, rather than as a system of processes that need close attention to planning and management.
David Maguire of ESRI spoke on the recent developments within ArcGIS 9.3 together with colleague Rob Elkins who listed the Top 10 Enhancements to ArcGIS 9.3:
1) Error Reporting Capabilities Enhanced
2) Identifying shortcuts and HTML pop-ups
3) Converting graphics – Features – Changing symbology
4) Reverse Geo-coding
5) Table Sorting, Alias, Joins
6) Transparent Legends
7) Clip Raster to Graphic Enhancement
8) Keyboard Shortcuts
9) Pause Label Function
10) Bookmarks
Maguire spoke on the recent development of REST and Rich Internet Applications which ESRI has built to include JAVA-Microsoft SilverLight-FLEX. He demonstrated several advances in ArcGIS Image Server for image analysis, automatic feature extraction and working with images in native formats across servers. In one demonstration, nearly 300 images were being processed with dynamic mosaicking and he mentioned that dynamic compression rates could be set, depending upon speed and detail needed, effectively controlling transmission rates. Metadata is now compiled for images and updates can proceed without taking the server offline. Later, Maguire mentioned a new ArcGIS Explorer code-named 900 that is being developed. It will include a new ribbon, 2D and 3D display and come with embedded geographic search. In an interview with David Maguire, he also mentioned that 3D GIS was developing and “it is an evolutionary process” that will have an impact similar to moving from black-white to colour television.
{sidebar id=252 align=right} Undoubtedly a highlight of the day was the presentation from Mark Smith and Steve Dunn together with students (Matthew, Mark, Rob) from The Grammar School at Leeds. They displayed several examples on the use of GIS by students including the Black Death of Suffolk in 1349, biodiversity hotspots, a tsunami disaster syllabus, grazing pastures for ecological niches, Yorkshire water data, hurricane tracking and field data gathering.
David Spackman of MapAction gave an interesting presentation keynote that described the work of the MapAction agency, a group who become involved in mapping disaster and relief situations almost immediately as they happen. The primary goals of the group are to fly into these events and ascertain the extent of the disaster, the access to them, where other relief agencies are geographically and to provide a common operation picture (COP) of the event for future planning and assistance. “These situations cry out for maps,” Spackman explained. He outlined the training of the workers and how 1500 individuals have now been trained by MapAction for this work, two of which come from ESRI UK.
David Shukman is a BBC environmental reporter and he gave a keynote on his work at that media agency. Having filed stories from Berlin, Sarajevo, Tuvalu, Antarctic and Canada, Shukman pointed to the environmental impacts of water drainage from the Aral Sea as the key event that impacted him to the sense of environmental degradation and change as the lake of that area disappeared. More recently he rode on a Canadian icebreaker that was plying the Arctic Northwest Passage, which has been melting under the influence of climate change.
Nick Chapallaz of ESRI UK directed my attention to the various applications of GIS within the country. Many were flood oriented, however, urban planning and the development of ‘place’ is becoming a key driver in many UK applications. The company is working with over 150 departments and central agencies providing technology solutions to the national Meat Hygiene Service and DEFRA for example. He suggested that ESRI UK finds itself involved in a wide range of utility related applications across the country and that Web GIS is now slowly gaining momentum. Meanwhile Charles Kennelly of ESRI UK has been working on a forest management technology that has been evolving for 10 years or so. The system involves the management of land parcel information, harvesting regimes over time and the aggregation of growth / yield analysis into a sustainable yield curve approach. The software, built on ArcGIS, separates inventory from the planning process to enable different user processes to interface and work with the program. It has resulted in a time saving that has reduced these operations downward from years to minutes. The software is now being used by 50-60% of forests within the UK by the Forestry Commission.
Eunice Gill and Linda Stuart presented on a topic related to the National Archives of the UK. Their quotes are probably some of the most unique I have heard this year. “We like out-of-date data” and “we’re storing data across decades, times is our boundary.” They mentioned that not only is the data a consideration when archiving, but that considerations relating to hardware must also be considered. They pointed to the video disc (something few of us probably can remember) which was replaced by digital video data, making the large record-like video discs obsolete. The key for archiving data is the metadata they indicated. It was also mentioned that European wide initiatives include instructions for archiving and that resources must included for undertaking this type of work.
{sidebar id=253 =align=left} Indeed, the need for metadata was also mentioned by Elizabeth Wilkinson of Snowflake Software, based in the UK. She says “we are seeing a growing number of users who come from different branches of government and industry who are new to geographic data.” Wilkinson suggests that ‘data harvesting’ is a viable method for integrating data from numerous sources. To do this, XML / GML provides an effective means to bring this information together, regardless of the source – provided schema translating is used for delivery. To achieve this, a concept that employs a local and hub relationship is used. The local databases feed the hubs that act as integrator’s for the geographic information. This particular type of application can be found in such applications as those involving spatial data infrastructure (SDI). “It’s all about XML / GML,” Wilkinson says.
Stefan Carlyle of DEFRA spoke on the upcoming UK Location Strategy that relates to the evolution of the European INSPIRE Directive. The SDI has direct importance in cases relating to flooding, blue tongue, foot and mouth disease and avian flu he said. Stuart also pointed to the case of islands of disparate data within the UK, but said an interoperable solution is forthcoming through INSPIRE and SDI and that common reference data will evolve. He mentioned a need for developing the skills to create common data shares and for helping people to understand and develop metadata. The UK Strategy is well underway since the Directive becomes law in May of 2009. Overall the UK will form one of many registries being established across the EU. Other examples include geoNorge in Norway. In summary he see’s the strategy following an initiative along the lines of ‘Place UK’ or ‘Locate UK’ or something along those lines.
Blog reports on this conference:
London – ESRI Europe, Middle East and Africa User Conference 2008
London – ESRI EMEA User Conference 2008 Opens
London: ESRI EMEA User Conference – Bits and Bites
ESRI EMEA User Conference 2008: Insurance & Integration
