"GIS is an integral tool set for conducting business and many tasks and operations in society today. It is hard to imagine running an electricity grid, performing land management over a wide area or working with environmental information without a GIS today..Like financial systems or human relations functions, GIS are embedded throughout daily life in many ways. Without them we would be reduced to slow moving paper trails and awkward database operations."

Jeff Thurston, Editor, EMEA and Russia, jeffthurston vector1media.com

"Going back to paper, mylar map sheets, and rows upon rows of drafting tables is truly a frightening thought. It’s frightening primarily due to the loss of efficiency and productivity that this would represent. It’s also scary to think that the real-time collaboration that digital tools provide would go away completely, as paper-based maps and plans provide little means for interactivity." 

 Matt Ball, Editor, Americas/Asia-Pacific, mattball vector1media.com  

1. India - National Institute for Ocean Technology
2. Paper - Making Small Work: Business Models for Electrifying the World
3. EPRI - Electric Power Research Institute
4. iisd - Sustainability Measurement and Assessment
5. Space Images - Russia GeoPortal

1. Group on Earth Observation - Biodiversity Observation Network (GEOBON)
2. Sensible City - A community-oriented marketing firm that focuses on social and environmental progress.
3. Project Earth - Educating children about environmental impacts and solutions.
4. Project for Public Spaces - Dedicated to helping people create and sustain public places.
5. Hydro-Climate Informatics - Australia's CSIRO is developing new information tools to quantify the extent of future climate change.

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It’s a daunting task to synthesize and analyze global knowledge regarding the health of the environment. The United Nations Environment Program’s World Conservation Monitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC) in Cambridge, United Kingdom, has a dedicated staff of more than 60 people that work to bring together data on global biodiversity and conservation to guide policy. A primary data product of UNEP-WCMC is the World Database of Protected Areas.V1 editor Matt Ball spoke with Derek Gliddon, head of the Informatics Program at UNEP-WCMC about the goals and challenges of the organization.

James Fee is well known in the ESRI development community, on the GIS blogosphere for his own blog, and as the person behind the blog aggregation site Planet Geospatial. James recently joined an architectural and engineering firm that is focusing a good deal of effort on building information models. V1 editor Matt Ball spoke with Fee about the growing opportunity of BIM, and the implications that this modeling software will have on the GIS industry.

Under sunny skies and with 1600 registered users in attendance, the annual ESRI EMEA User Conference was held in London, UK last week at the Queen Elizabeth Convention Centre under the theme 'GIS for everyday life'. Richard Waite, president of ESRI (UK) opened the show welcoming guests from across the globe. He said that this gathering was the largest European GIS conference by number in attendance as well as the largest in the country - “GIS is an indespensible part of life.”