ESRI 2008 UC – Morning Keynote Notes!

Here are my notes from the keynote this morning. It’s heavily weighted toward the desktop and server technologies. They’re unfiltered with quirky comments, so forgive the stream of conciousness (and any grammatical errors)!

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Secretary of the Interior is talking about the joys of GIS. He got an award. He’s talking about how the government at the highest levels use GIS to do their work. Apparently the President uses GIS all the time in his reports. Darn well better! Now we’re learning about the endangered species act decision with the polar bear. Nice map showing how GIS helped him make the decision. There’s a 1979 image, 1999, and 2007 and the long term ice is going bye bye. He’s talking about the manager/higher level GIS so decision makers can make more informed decisions. Apparenly the Interior department is going to keep the FGDC, which is good. The USGS ladsat archive is going to be made available over the Internet for free by the end of this year. He’s announcing a new position – the geospatial communications officer. He’ll coordinate the efforts of all the Interior positions. It will be interesting to see how that position evolves over time. Hopefully it makes it into the new administrator.

Geography/GIS In Action, this year’s theme. He’s talking about the history. Mentions a geographer and calls him a “wholeist”, or someone who looks at all the parts. I now have a new label for myself!

New stuff in 9.3, but now in video form! Bunch of users complaining about little enhancements they’d like to see. Apparently all of those ended up in 9.3 Top 10 countdown of time savers. 10. Bookmarks are easier to get to and manage. You can save bookmarks to a file to trade with other users. 9. Pause labels. 8. Keyboard shortcut for grouped layers. To move through time you can hold down alt key to have all layers turn off as you turn on one layer. Way cool for time series! 7. Clip a raster or image to a graphic shape. Makes it easier to select the data extent you want to analyze. 6. Transparent legends. Legend can now be updated so that the colors in the legend actually match the colors on the map when transparent. 5. Table sorting aliases and joins. You can sort on multiple fields in the table. You can jump between field aliases and actual database field names in the table headers. Means one less step when you do joins. 4. Reverse geocoding. Address inspector gives best/closest address on the map as you move over. 3. Convert graphics to features. 2. Identify html shortcuts and popups. Use identify tool on the layer and use right click to immediately update a specific symbology. 1. Bug fixes, performace stability, increased reliability. A new error reporting dialogue, as you see in Windows when a program crashes. There’s a video trying to explain what happens when a crash happens and how the error report enters the dev team’s database looking for known issues. I personally think they messed up making it look like the dialogue that Windows uses, because people are pretty used to hitting “cancel” when they see that without thinking much about it. I honestly thought they said this stuff was in 9.2 last year, but I can’t remember. Personally, I wouldn’t have made that number 1 on the count down. “Best thing about our software, doesn’t crash as much!!” Not the normal marketing message you see.

Arc server. Caching clearly makes a HUGE difference. Pretty maps, fast, which is more or less anthithical to ArcIMS. Now on to ArcGIS Javascript. Drag and drop map into map server to publish to make it available. You can then click on the service in a browser and see the map. Just view source, copy around 10 lines, past it in a website, and easy peasy you have an interactive web site. How about geoprocessing? It’s there. Now they’re announcing the Flex API. Flex is a new development environment. The api is showing a rather complext looking environment with a flashy looking interface. The new server uses open APIs so you can use whatever technologies or languages you like – .NET, Flex, PHP, Ruby, etc. Clearly caching is the way to go for map services and taping into the open programming technologies to make next gen online mapping applications.

Jack is saying the new model for web mapping is the GIS professional publishing services and tools. End MASHUP users will tap into those services/technologies to create dynamic apps. Thus the amateur tinker will interact with those professionally developed applications to make powerful and nearly limitless combinations. John Greyson is demoing a bunch of “patterns” in the design patterns mold to suggest ways the expert data/services can be interfaced with the amateur programmer. I wonder if these design patterns will be made available on a website for use? They look like a neat basic launch pad for more complex applications later. I just noticed that all the examples given here feature the slip/slidey interface that google pioneered. Thank god, couldn’t happen sooner! The next pattern is showing a map/polygon over lay as you move through time. I TOTALLY need this for my dissertation! Now on to GEOrss feeds, something I haven’t played with nearly enough. I also just noticed that its kinda funny that, for a company so tightly partnered with Microsoft, all the examples are being run on Firefox (3.0 if I’m not mistaken).

Now onto mobile technologies. Jack is talking about a new method beyond ArcPad. There’s a demo video then Mike Miller is going to give a demo (I wonder if it’s the same Mike Miller that tried to beat me up in high school?) The video is of a fire department/water department combo that uses this mobile model to keep info about fire hydrants up to date. Mike (different Mike then I knew) is showing some people out in the field in real time doing some updates/data collections outside the conference center. He’s showing an AT&T Windows mobile phone running something called ArcGIS Mobile. The information updates are done with the phone in real times and you can sync data over the Internet back to the enterprise to update your data. I really wonder about accuracy issues, as my Windows Mobile phone isn’t the highest accuracy mobile device. I’m not entirely certain how this radically changes the model from ArcPad and a mobile GPS device. Oh, way cool! I can try out ArcGIS mobile using my phone while we’re at the conference. I’m TOTALLY doing that.

Now onto Imagery and ArcServer. I’m hoping they talk more about Image Server. Now there is server side Image processing. I HATE dealing with Oracle, so anything that gets me out of that is cool with me. I totally zonked out on this talk, which is a shame. I was distracted trying to get myself hooked up to play with ArcMobile. I’m all setup to start playing with it after lunch. I’ll have a demo up about it later, hopefully. I’m now focusing on the imagery talk and there is some cool stuff in 9.3. There’s a lot more streaming stuff available that seems to work faster and more efficient. Imagery is always the biggest pain due to size. Any improvements on this front are going to be well received by the community as a whole.

Now ArcGIS Explorer, probably the least technology I’ve used the least. I like the idea, but I normally just want to jump to getting my hands dirty with the programming. Bernie, who we’ve talked to many times before, is telling us about the new stuff available. Jack announced that this would be the last session for the morning, which is unfortunate as people are leaving. We’re listing to a person who uses ArcGIS Explorer in their day to day job, which is cool. One of the down sides to hearing about the capabilities of a technology is you don’t get a sense for how it works in the real world. The “how does it play in Pioria” is always a factor. It’s nice to hear a real world example. ArcGIS Explorer is pretty cool if you like the stock interface (which I don’t especially). Adding new resources is a cakewalk. That’s super helpful for people with low levels of GIS knowledge. The speaker is giving a good talk about how the city of Phoenix is using the product to do real GIS work with not a lot of hassle. There’s the ability to create maps and add base data from the library, as well as custom layers. There’s also the ability to do fairly decent analysis. I can see this being great for something like a mobile solution for, say, first responders. She just mad a mistake talking, which she corrected herself. I’m stunned, as I would be a bumbling mess if I had to talk up there! There’s a nice ability to embed custom icons and links to web pages/html content. Some cool photos are shown from links on points, so you can get a real sense for how things look on the ground in relative real time. Now we’re seeing a 3D elevation map that’s just pretty freakin’ neat. The most amazing part of this product and this general movement in GIS is the democratization of GIS. The general masses are starting to get real GIS functionality and powerful capabilities without a ton of work.

That’s it for the morning keynote. More to follow after lunch!