Monday, June 30. 2008

What's the next ESRI Summit?

The ESRI Surveying and Engineering GIS Summit is in its fifth year this August. The ESRI Remote Sensing and GIS Summit debuts at the same time, just before the formal Monday opening of the ESRI International User Conference. Also occurring before the main event are the Executive Summit (invitation only) and the Education User Conference, EdUC.

Of these, I've only managed to attend EdUC (I have a standing commitment to ride in or volunteer at the Pan Mass Challenge bike event, which often occurs the Friday/Sat preceding UC). It's just great and I hope I can attend again somehow, now that I'm teaching again. The Executive Summit, which my colleague Joe Francica has attended (his 2005 review), is all about helping executives "get" or "get more" out of GIS.

But these "new" summits are different. They are, from what I gather, opportunities to build bridges with related disciplines. I use that term with care. A discipline has its own rules, its own tools and technologies, in these cases, tools and technologies allied with GIS. I want to contrast disciplines with "industries" or "business areas." While ESRI does have a "surveying industry manager," Brent Jones, who hails from the Northeast, somehow it doesn't fall into the same space as other ESRI "industries." It's more like the "industry" I used to manage at ESRI, the one called "CAD." Surveying, like CAD and remote sensing, is horizontal and serves many industries. Other ESRI industries, oil and gas, pipeline, water, insurance, forestry, agriculture and others tap into GIS to better serve their customers and their bottom line. Surveying, photogrammetry, remote sensing and even CAD are more about data creation and preparation. They are sometimes thought of more as "inputs" to spatial databases and analyses.

So, what will be the next summit ESRI will announce? Will it be LiDAR? CAD? GPS? Location determination? User generated data? With what other technologies does ESRI and by extension the rest of the GIS establishment need to build bridges?

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