2008 Plenary Overview: Living in a Sustainable World

"Amazing" was a popular descriptor uttered by wide-eyed attendees of the ESRI UC Plenary. The works of GIS users around the world were highlighted by ESRI President Jack Dangermond. Illustrating the conference theme “GIS: Geography in Action,” Dangermond talked about the importance of GIS as part of the solution to the challenge of living in a sustainable world.

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2008 ESRI International User Conference Plenary Opening
—Jack Dangermond, president of ESRI
Listen or download: MP3

Listen to Jack Dangermond, president of ESRI, welcome attendees to the 2008 ESRI International User Conference and present GIS awards to the State of Qatar, Centre for GIS; the City of Philadelphia; and Rosario Giusti de Pérez and Ramón A. Pérez, Venezuelan architects and urban planners.
—Published August 20, 2008

New functionality and capability enhancements in the recently released ArcGIS 9.3 were put into contexts of developing GIS integration, applications and technological solutions, and infrastructure that supports communal exchange. To do so, ESRI presenters demonstrated software advancements.

ArcGIS Desktop Enhancements
ArcGIS Desktop improvements were described including functionality that simplified users’ tasks from keyboard shortcuts, to reverse geocoding, to converting graphics to features. Capabilities for sharing by connecting the desktop project to the GeoWeb showed the ease of consuming ArcGIS Online content, exporting KML, and using GIS-enabled PDFs.

Prediction of growth was modeled using the new Geographically Weighted Regression tool for statistical analysis. Michael Parkin of MIT demonstrated 3D visualization improvements through an impressive campus facility management application. An ESRI technician explained values rendered from an ArcLogistics analysis, which modeled how organizations could save hundreds of thousands of dollars using intelligent fleet management strategies.

ArcGIS Server Drives WebGIS
ArcGIS Server improvements were dramatized via working scenarios. A federated pattern of shared applications and data was applied within a situational setting in Louisville, Kentucky, that described how new-generation Web 2.0 principles and practices engender Web-based communities of hosted services. This, in turn, gives rise to the capabilities to use content from multiple map services and create mashups for ad hoc, federated, and enterprise applications.

Integrated GIS and image server technology was demonstrated using German applications from the Bavarian Forest Service and the Hamburg Fire Department. The integration allows GIS users to perform dynamic processing in the server, serve it up to an image service, and deliver it into a standard GIS for display, analysis, and visualization.

GIS Awards
The most important component of a successful GIS is not the software but rather the people who use it. “In 2008,” said Dangermond, "one-quarter million organizations used ArcGIS in their work, which has been a spectacular endeavor. From this group, ESRI expressly acknowledges 150 outstanding users by conferring its Special Achievement in GIS award."

In addition, Dangermond presented specific awards during the Plenary. The Enterprise Application Award was presented to the State of Qatar, Centre for GIS for its holistic integration of GIS across the country. This was accepted by Mohamed Abd Elwahab Hamoud.

The President’s Award was given to the City of Philadelphia for multiple uses of resources and data. It was accepted by Jim Querry, director of enterprise GIS.

The Making a Difference Award honored two recipients. The first were Rósario C. Grustide Pérez and Ramón A. Pérez for research about urban poverty in the barrios of Caracas.

The second was awarded to the U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne who announced the USGS’ latest action to make 35 years of Landsat information freely available for worldwide consumption. Read more.

Looking Ahead
"I believe that GIS work is driving change and is creating a digital foundation by abstracting data, models, and workflows," said Dangermond. "Our thinking is becoming spatially integrated, changing how we reason, defining patterns of our actions, evolving collaborative structures. Moreover, GIS is changing our work to adopt a science-based approach. We are introducing systems for measuring, accounting, and analyzing geography, then visualizing it to make decisions. GIS is helping people plan for a more sustainable world. GIS is raising awareness."

Dangermond described how GIS is enacting change within IT user communities. "Today’s GIS implementations follow three patterns, the Desktop for creating and editing data, the Sever for sharing information to a wider audience, and Federated systems, which join together server technologies for collaborating and sharing information across organizations."

Dangermond continued, "These three patterns provide a foundation for a fourth pattern—Web GIS. This pattern provides new opportunities for leveraging your work through Web applications. It is about harnessing the power of the Web with all the power of what you do in GIS—going far beyond simple mapping or visualization and ultimately becoming a part of society’s infrastructure. GIS professionals will be implementing this infrastructure by authoring and serving knowledge, maps, and visualizations as well as analytic interpretations and authoritative applications. These will be consumed by casual users leveraging our collective knowledge."

GIS for a Sustainable World
During the afternoon session, representatives of the Missouri Botanical Garden explained their work and how GIS is helping to achieve its mission. Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Litzsinger Road Ecology Center, Bob Coulter, described the Garden’s learning outreach program. A participant of that program, Molly Paterson, a graduate of 6th grade, Flynn Park Elementary School, showed off her ethnicity demographic analysis of neighborhoods in University City, Missouri.

Dr. Peter H. Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden, delivered the Keynote Address, in which he described the environmental diversity of the planet and the challenges for humans to live in a sustainable world. He illustrated the many problems we face with growing populations, altered landscapes, over-consumption, and climate change. These are rapidly altering the face of our environment.

The Garden’s research scientist Dr. Trish Consiglio explained how the research lab uses GIS to put its enormous database to work by combining grid analysis, verifiable identification, and regression computation within GIS. From this, she presented a model for predicting species relationships within areas where little is known.

Raven concluded, "Technological tools, such as GIS, bring to bear a proper understanding of these problems and a proper solution. It helps us in our endeavors to develop love and concern for other people. These tools equip us to turn from passivity toward active engagement in developing much needed solutions."

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