Jack Dangermond, president and founder of Esri, gave the morning keynote at the Senior Executive Seminar at the 2011 Esri International User Conference in San Diego this morning. The topic matched the theme of this year’s conference, “Understanding Our World.”
Today, GIS is changing our planet by helping us understand our world, rooted in the science of geography. GIS got its start as computational geography, by blending computers, mapping and geographic science, a new kind of exploration that looks at relationships, patterns and processes. The early pioneering work led to the creation of a platform that supports visualization, modeling, and spatial data management.
GIS continues to accelerate, and is compelling right now, because maps communicate, spatial analytics helps us understand and make decisions about our world, and cloud computing extends GIS massively beyond just simply desktop use. GIS is helping to unlock in environmental conservation, ecological science, natural resources, disaster response, business analytics, crime mapping, etc. GIS is becoming societal infrastructures as a national information system. The issue of climate change is going to have a major impact, and GIS has a huge role to play in the desperate race to turn around the impact.
GIS is evolving with many forces that are converging, including more measurement, more ubiquitous computer networks, open data policies, better geographic science, and it all feeds collective geographic understanding. GIS changes how we reason by bringing together different disciplines and creating integrated thinking. It also changes how we communicate as an essential language.
New measurements, such as Lidar and crowd-sourcing are giving us whole new dimensions of data. The integration, and dynamic connection, between GIS and remote sensing is leading to almost persistent surveillance. The connectivity of people and systems with social networking tools are also changing how we communicate.
GIS is being implemented in multiple patterns, from desktop, to server, to cloud and Web GIS. Taking geography out in the field, by viewing geography and assets together, and synoptic observation becomes possible.
The next big step, according to Dangermond, is rolling GIS into the Web cloud pattern with a distributed network of data and services. This integration of distributed information with geography, makes GIS easier to use, and will be used by everyone from policy people, manager, GIS users, and the public.
The plethora of geospatial information coming together on the Web, linking users, creates GIS in a whole new dimension. One of the mediums of this new era is intelligent web maps, that bring together visualization, editing, analysis, models, tools and data sets. The access to the raw services in a simple form, allows them to be seen on a web map, on a phone, embedded in a website, and can go anywhere.
The distributed GIS sources, linked to a catalog, allows people to reach back, and also share easily with others. Given this new openness, GIS will continue to expand, because it provides clear business value, meets expanding needs, and there’s a growing awareness of the power of maps.
