GovTech Interviews Dangermond
Chad Vander Veen at Government Technology offers a “rare” interview with Jack Dangermond.
From the author’s intro:
[Dangermond addresses] ESRI’s growing Web presence and chart the company’s future. He also explained FedStat, a proposed stimulus dollar-tracking solution based on a program initiated by Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley called StateStat; itself an evolution of New York City’s legendary CompStat, a system of allocating police resources based on spatial data. In addition to stimulus spending and tracking, Dangermond explained the important role GIS will play in infrastructure, smart roads, energy, cloud computing and more.
Of note:
- The author refers to Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth as “quasi-GIS applications,” and Dangermond confirms they are not really GIS products.
- Dangermond suggests, if I understands his comment, that there are 40,000 ArcGIS Servers in the wild. “The integration in an analytic environment of many types of geographic data - those [Google Earth and Virtual Earth] platforms are not designed for that. What is designed for that are GIS servers. We now have about 40,000 of these servers that are running in the open Web. I like to call this “Web GIS,” and it’s a similar architecture in the sense that it’s server-centric and serves out freely to thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people views, page views or intelligent views of geographic data.”
- On knowledge sharing: “There’s certainly no sense that I have that GIS professionals hoard knowledge. They have been famous for as long as I have known them, for 40 years, in sharing and wanting to share their information with others.”
- On cloud computing: “So cloud computing is where GIS is going.”
