Monday, July 13. 2009

#ESRIUC Keynoters Provide Extraordinary Leadership Despite Personal Dangers

The keynote presentations today at the ESRI UC were extraordinary. Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist and author of "The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else" provided attendees with an fantastic dissertation on free market capitalism which begins and ends with the distribution and recording of land records. "The solution to poverty is making dead capital (no property ownership), 'live capital,'" said de Soto. De Soto confers with leaders from nations who are just beginning the process of land record management. He works with them to begin the process of establishing formal land ownership policies that is supported with the legal authority to sustain it. "What incentivises a politician to make the change? If he is in a democracy it's votes. If not, it is still public support… The genesis of capitalism is property," said de Soto. De Soto both congratulated and castigated the U.S. for the decision in the 19th century to establish land ownership reform but forgetting what is necessary to build a democratic society while intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan. His capitalist vision has sometimes led to personal danger as he has been the victim of assassination attempts.

The second keynote presentation was by Dr. Willie Smits, a Dutch forester and chairman of the Masarang Foundation as well as the founder of the Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS) that took on the deforestation of Borneo. His initial work centered on preserving Orangutan habitat and soon employed GIS to understand why the habitat was disappearing. The habitat was being replaced by palm oil plants because of the demand for vegetable oil and fuel, as well as myriad other uses for palm. Now, he is advocating the substitution of palm oil plants with sugar palm plants which, as he explained, are “carbon positive” used in the production of sugar and ethanol. His use of geospatial technology is helping to convince corporations to limit the deforestation, change to sugar palms and thus reduce impact to the land and natural habitats.

#ESRIUC Day One Tidbits

Bernie Szukalski demoed ArcGIS Explorer 900 (coming soon) and showed off how it is GIS for Everyone, which interestingly, was the slogan for ArcView back in the day.

When Jack Dangermond asked how many attendees were using ArcGIS Explorer, very few raised their hands. I wonder when it will take off? The latest version with presentation support may pick up some new users including those who present GIS data and educators.

The next version of ArcGIS will be 9.4. ESRI pondered calling it 10, but decided to hold back to 9.4 to highlight quality and stability, and I think, manage expectations. I hope it works for both ESRI and users.

One of John Calkins top 9 enhancements in ArcGIS 9.4 is dockable, hideable windows for things like Catalog and the table of contents. That means there's more space for the map! That, per research done by Muki Haklay, should mean higher productivity. His work noted that ESRI users typically have less map real estate compared to other desktop GIS users.

Jack Dangermond noted the release at 9.4 of an API to the geodatabase. He said that'd make the geodatabase an open format. I don't agree that having an API makes it an open format. I continue to encourage people to ask what people mean when they use the term open.

Lowrie Jordan talked about quite a lot of "on the fly" technology for imagery coming in 9.4 including color balancing, orthorectification and pan sharpening. Very cool. Is that ESRI technology or something they licensed? I'll be looking into that.

Chris Cappelli showed off an early version of the ESRI iPhone app. It looked like most other mobile mapping apps on the iPhone. Dangermond was excited about how the device could be used to capture user generated (professional or casual) data. Still, it's the database structure on the back end, he noted that makes this solution different.

Later in the day I ran into Mansour Raad who heads up ESRI's Flex team. He showed me the 3D routing demo for the conference running on the iPhone. He explained that now that we have these smart mobile devices, we might as well use them to do "cooperative" processing. In this case, that means querying the server, and having it deliver the data to a thicker (more RIA-like) client.

When I watch TV with my Dad he points out that in all the cop/detective/doctor dramas, all the characters seem to do is walk and talk. In GIS it seems all people do (based on images here at the ESRI user conference) is point at paper maps or monitors.

ESRI is 40 years old this year.

The list of ESRI's goals is back to three: advance GIS, promote spatial thinking and support its employees growth. Each year it morphs just a bit, but generally stays around just a few key ideas.

Final quote of the morning session is from Thomas Edison: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." I've also seen it attributed to Abraham Lincoln and Alan Kay. Still, it's a good quote and very appropriate for the "Designing our Future" theme of the conference.

I've heard suggestions that Twitter is overloaded by ESRI and things tagged with #ESRIUC are not being found.

ESRI received 100 queries from folks wanting to present lightening talks on Monday night. They selected just 20 presenters.

#ESRIUC: 9.3.1 Tips and Tricks

While most users have ArcGIS 9.3.1 in hand and many have installed it, there are still some goodies in there that might not be widely used. So, part of the plenary was a "new features" session.

One of the more impressive demos highlighted tuning ArcGIS Server for better performance. The cool part: ESRI added a tool to ArcGIS to help find the source of the slowdowns. They might include some bad paths to data, layers that must be projected on the fly, unindexed layers and the like. The tool identifies potential "bumps" in the road and the user can then fix them. Some can be fixed right from the tool's list. The other part of the performance increase relies on some new code in the graphics engine in ArcGIS Server.

The tool is one many vendors should be considering: how to take the best practices known by some and turn them into basically a wizard for others. That way, ideally, all server implementations are faster and ESRI and its customers look good.

A "best practices" discussion illustrated the value of separating base and operational layers in an application. The former don't change while the latter are used for analysis. Separating them this way makes it easy to "swap in" a new or different base map.

There was also a demo of all the ArcGIS Online's "easy fast and free" datasets. I think ESRI is working hard to get users to depend on and use these new datasets both in ArcGIS and ArcGIS Explorer. That will be a first step, I think, in getting users to share their data via ArcGIS Online, which Dangermond noted users had been clamoring for for quite a while. The reaction didn't seem to match that statement or perhaps since users had seen this feature (it was launched in beta a few weeks ago, our coverage) it was old news.

MapIt: Enterprise Solution for Putting Dots on Maps

Perhaps that's putting it a bit too simply, but that's how I understand the new enterprise offering MapIt (software + Web services) developed by ESRI in cooperation with Microsoft. The idea is to put spatial data in SQL Server or Excel spreadsheets into "smart maps" and to integrate with SharePoint. The app is licensed per Web server at $4,500 (U.S.). The resulting maps are delivered via Sliverlight or WPF.

My hunch is that this is really aimed at Microsoft users who don't yet have GIS or use location intelligence, but do have an enterprise need for spatial visualization. The use cases focus around businesses, but include first responder needs. It basically puts all the pieces needed (data, geocoding, charts, etc.) for basic business uses into a single server/services package. This is a big step beyond the old basic mapping functionality found in Excel! It may also be a step into a Microsoft-built BI solution.

- video
- demos
- press release

#ESRIUC Plenary Award Winners

CenterPoint Energy's Cindi Salas, director, Land & Field Services took the Enterprise Application Award. The utility serves 1.2 million electric and 3.2 million gas customers. It's big accomplishment with GIS (and other tools I'm sure): getting power up and running after hurricane Ike in just days. Of note in the video from the company: all of the desktop GIS users had two monitors.

Dr. K. Kasturirangan, Member (Science), Planning Commission, Government of India, received the Making a Difference Award for his work on India's space program. He'll be making more of a difference in a new role, leading planning for the country. He didn't speak to his own accomplishments, but rather described Jack Dangermond as providing "extraordinary leadership," as a "missionary," and an "impeccable professional." ESRI works harder than most companies to highlight its users work. It was perhaps appropriate that this fellow pushed his success back to ESRI in general and toward Dangermond in particular.

Martin O'Malley, as I noted earlier this week, received the President's Award. The state was about ESRI customer #8 and the governor described GIS as perhaps, "the lynchpin of a powerful new movement." In a talk/demo he highlighted the importance of GIS for "strengthening connections" and "sharing rather than hoarding" data. It was interesting to see a governor giving a GIS (Web) demo, but I honestly felt bad for what must be a very strong GIS staff, who save the head of StateStat, were not mentioned.

Podcast: Examining the 2009 #ESRIUC Plenary

The first session of the ESRI User Conference reviews the technology vision, including a look at current and future releases and the conference theme. Our editors review some key points and themes and share their responses.


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