In this interview with ESRI President Jack Dangermond, Directions Magazine Editor in Chief Joe Francica discusses the health of the GIS technology sector, jobs and educating the next generation of geospatial professionals. Dangermond talks about the growth that ESRI is experiencing and how the state of the economy has impacted sales of GIS to the local, state and federal markets. This episode of DMTV also includes a brief review of the 2010 ESRI Federal User Conference that was held in Washington DC, February 17-19. [below is the YouTube and edited version of the interview…the entire 20 minute interview is also available for downloading here in Windows Media format.]
Wyatt Kash of GCN summarizes the event and announcements. Sample:
Introducing the new ArcGIS platform — with the choreographed staging and muted star power reminiscent of a more famous California-based technology company — was ESRI founder, patriarch and President Jack Dangermond.
Plenary Videos are up at ESRI FedUC website.
Among them: Holder, Dangermond’s Vision for ArcGIS 10, What’s New, etc.
David Smith did some live blogging (and some not so live):
I didn’t see these details elsewhere, but Comptuerworld reports:
Initially ESRI will offer ArcGIS Server Enterprise Advanced v10, along with a few extensions, on AWS. “The ArcGIS Server Amazon Machine Images, hosted in the AWS cloud, will not be made available until the ArcGIS Server v10 release [in July], and only for customers under an ESRI Enterprise License Agreement,” says Victoria Kouyoumjian, IT Strategy Architect at ESRI. Users who don’t want to wait for the release of v10 can run ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 in the cloud, but that requires retaining ESRI Professional Services to assist in getting it up and running.
If you are considering Microsoft Silverlight as an option to build a rich internet applications (RIA) while leveraging ArcGIS for geospatial web services, the ESRI team provided some guidelines during a presentation at the FedUC.
To get started, they advise developing the application with a combination of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Silverlight 3 although the current version of ArcGIS supports Silverlight 2 but will in the next release. As a platform for building the user interface (UI) and visualizing the application they also recommended Microsoft Expression Blend 3.
Why Expression Blend? While Visual Studio provides the platform for developing the "code behind" buttons, tools, etc., Expression Blend is more for the graphic designer. But for those organizations that don’t have both a developer and a designer, the two applications work in tandem. The actual "code behind" the UI is primarily extensible application markup language (XAML).
The ArcGIS API is built on Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). The API allows the developer to combine RIA with ArcGIS Server and other services like Bing Map Enterprise Services. Once developed, applications are then rendered in a browser using the Silverlight plugin. The API is powered by ArcGIS Server REST services and is free for non-commercial users.
The features of the API include both tasks an controls. The tasks include "find data," Query," "Address Locator," and "Routing." Silverlight controls already include data grids and charts while the ESRI toolkit includes map-related functions such as "navigation," "map tips," "toolbar," "FeatureDataGrid," and a "MapProgressBar." The API also includes starter templates as well as extensible triggers, actions, and behaviors.
Each Silverlight application is compiled as a DLL just like a traditional .NET library and published the app as a XAP file, which is a ZIP archive containing Silverlight applications. To use XAP file the web server must serve out the XAP file with the correct MIME type. There is a need for cross domain access as well and this access requires a clientaccesspolicy.xml file; if not you’ll get an error because client policy is in place. See http:/services.arcgisonline.com/clientaccesspolicy.xml
More information on the ArcGIS API can be found at Resources.esri.com. Go to the resource center for SDKs to download API - you’ll need an ESRI global account.
A new term? Volunteered geographic information (VGI)? During demos at the ESRI Federal User’s Conference the term was used repeatedly to describe how anyone from GIS users to tourists could contribute location-based information in real-time to decision-makers. Do we need another term where "crowd sourced" more common in the vernacular of contributing geospatial information.
