First off, I wanted the Census' story on the situation with the point addresses it has collected for the 2010 census. The big questions on many lips here at the event: will that data be made available? Per the team the Census booth, right now, by law, it can't be distributed. As one team member noted, and I paraphrase: How can we get people to answer our surveys if we give out such data? It's a slippery slope. What will be done with it? It will help Census mail out the survey forms next years to a nice clean address list. It will also be used to update the address ranges on the TIGER data. (That will be public, as usual.) As I understand it, for the point data to be distributed, the existing federal law would need to be changed by Congress. That's off course possible and some private companies have already begun asking for such a change. So, stay tuned on this one!

Next, I got word from talking to folks on the floor (hat tip to Dale!) that one of the cool things you might not have heard about in 9.4 is changes to ArcSchematics. ESRI acquired the company who made it (a French company) a few years ago and slowly but surely, the code is being integrated fully into ArcGIS. There are some big changes at 9.4. First off, schematics are now a full fledged feature type. That means all the regular ArcGIS tools like labels, Mapplex, symbols are all accessible to make pretty schematics. There's also a "locking" tool so that two users can't edit the same schematic at the same time. Finally, there's a way to have schematics associated with one version of project to be "updated" to be associated with a new version. Making that change keeps symbology intact, and the user need only "update" the changes from the older version. Both of the Schematics team members I spoke to were very happy to make these changes since they addressed exactly the need of the users.

Finally, I wanted to be sure I understood the source of the technology behind the cool imagery tools expected in 9.4. Lowrie Jordan noted at Monday's plenary on the fly color balancing, orthorectification and pan sharpening. To me, that's hard stuff to do and hard stuff to do fast and on the fly. So, I figured ESRI must have acquired some special code to do that. Nope; it's new code. And, per the ERSI rep on the imagery team, it's way fast. He smiled a lot when talking about it! He did confirm that ESRI did acquire some imagery technology some eight or so years ago and has used this as a base, but the new goodies coming for 9.4 are indeed new. The other thing he made clear: ESRI is still figuring out how to package these tools; should they be in the box, an extension? Some of each? That's all up in the air for the moment.

Bonus follow up: I also followed up, in a separate post, on the confusing comment about the ArcGIS Server APIs being free for commercial use.