Yesterday in San Diego, CA, the 24 annual International ESRI user conference got underway. As usual, the event began with a captivating welcome address from ESRI President Jack Dangermond. This year's theme... "The language of geography" and this year's hype... ArcGIS 9.

Dangermond used his 1.5 hours on stage to present a fascinating description of ESRI's customers, solutions, strategies, and business models. From my perspective, "Jack" seemed very at ease and upbeat, soliciting applause and laughter from the crowd on numerous occasions.

First, some bookkeeping - Conference 24 is believed to have attracted more than 13,000 (including 1,000 ESRI staff) from some 135 countries. Users are representing more than 100,000 organizations who license the 1 million+ ESRI software seats.

In typical fashion, the crowd was first encouraged to meet each other and a couple of minutes was reserved to shake hands with neighbors and introduce ourselves... as usual it was quite amusing and enjoyable. This was followed by Dangermond's lengthy example of what he feels are some of the "cool" things that users are doing with ESRI software and solutions. Just a few of the projects mentioned included work by:

- National Geographic Society World Atlas

- AAA trip tick

- Mecklenburg County GIS

- LA Fire incident mapping

- Cape Cod land-use change

- Keystone Energy apps

- geodata.gov

- And many others

The theme "the language of geography" set the context for the week-long event as Dangermond reminded us how we live in a changing World, a World of conflict, and a World of challenging and complex problems. "We need more understanding and collaboration" noted Dangermond, and GIS provides the tools to support this collaboration. Language is used to describe the World and respond to change while GIS is emerging as a new language, introducing new concepts.

ArcGIS 9

During the welcome address it was clear that ArcGIS 9.0 was to be the feature of this year's event. We were informed of the many sessions planned to introduce users to the features of the ArcGIS 9.0 core products and extensions and advised of just some of the main features and updates awaiting users at release 9. Some of the new concepts and features in 9.0 are found in the following disciplines:

- geoprocessing

- visualization

- interoperability

- cartography

- Imaging

Attendees of the welcome session were informed of many improvements shipped with ArcGIS 9.0 (far too many to list) as well as a number of extensions shipping or coming soon. these include:

- ArcGIS Publisher - distribute and share data that can be viewed with the free ArcReader

- Data Interoperability extension - developed by Safe software this extension enables the direct use of more than 65 data formats (I heard 73 mentioned in one session!)

- Maplex -  a rule-based label placement solution

- 3D Analyst - use existing GIS in a true 3D environment

Given that the list of new and useful features at 9.0 is so extensive, ESRI's John Calkins provided an entertaining play on the "Top 10" list by providing his own Top 10 new features in ArcGIS 9...

1. Alphabetical lists in toolbars (woohoo...)

2. Don't need ArcCatalog to create new a feature class or SHP file

3. clip map extent to an area

4. Interoperability and data sharing enhancements

5. Bring in web services and use geocoding to create apps directly in numerous languages

6. On the fly reprojection of rasters and calculate stats based on display

7. Compression techniques for working with large datasets

8. One place labels and automated placement and adjustment

9. Masking out features based on display properties

10. less mousing thanks to new keyboard short-cuts

*11. within the "What's new in ArcGIS 9.0" document you can drag the pause drawing icon directly onto toolbar and use

Accompanying the 9.0 release is ArcGIS Server, designed to leverage the advantages of blade computing, a component architecture that enables deployment anywhere.

Judging by his enthusiasm, one of Jack’s favorite extensions coming at version 9.0 is 3D analyst. The publisher product has now been extended for publishing maps and even more exciting, the new interoperability extension provides for the direct reading of more than 70 data formats.

We were informed of a few things that fall under the "Coming soon" category:

- Network Analyst - tools and apps supporting advanced network analysis

- ArcPad 7.0 - extending ArcGIS to the mobile environment - look for a faster solution that will support ArcGIS symbology

- ArcGIS personal Server (at 9.1) - a simple to use and install solution supporting map services and promoting the concept of peer-to-peer GIS

- ArcGIS 9.0.1 for Linux and SOLARIS OS (shipping fall 2004)

The product news, features, and announcements go on and on so I'll attempt to cover these in more detail in a few days.

Some noteworthy quotes and concepts from day 1:

- It's not just about the data, it’s about what we know

- metadata is emerging as a powerful key

- GIS is emerging as a web services environment

- Blade computing is the most exciting advent in computing today and will provide the backbone support Terrabyte/sec downloads [down the road]

- It's so easy to use that even Jack can use it!

One of the coolest things we saw on Day 1. during Dangermon's address was new piece of hardware known as the Touch Table. Think of a large light table and now throw in a powerful CPU or connect the display to your server. Now imagine viewing your GIS data on the table and access commands by simple touch screen functionality. The crowd was "wowed" by the display as we saw high-resolution satellite imagery of Athens displayed on the screen and Jack panned, zoomed, and queried information by simply touch-screen commands. "Pages" or layers of imagery were folded in and we saw a nice temporal comparison showing pre-Olympic scenes blending in with present day images of Athens. I'm sure my description doesn't really do this product justice so I suggest you look at the Northrop Grumman website for more information (http://www.northropgrumman.com/) or contact them directly. I'm sure you'll hear more about this one soon!

Stay tuned as we come out with more on ArcGIS 9.0 ArcGIS Server 9.0, ArcPad, and other ESRI solutions over the next several days. For now, so long from San Diego. Tuesday is vendor night tonight as the likes of Tele Atlas, GDT, Space Imaging, GlobeXplorer and others host customers, clients, and friends at social gatherings around the town.

On a personal note, some of the cool things I've found this year in the Gaslamp district... fantastic Tuna at the Strip Club Steakhouse; an impressive venue for the Survey Summit at the very plush, 5 star Omni hotel; a great stadium in the heart of downtown in PetCo Park - home of the Padres; an interesting late night walk through the courthouse district (don't try this alone!); Little Italy... I don't know how I missed this area in years past; Dick's... as abusive as ever; Poolside at the Marriott.. I know, I'm not staying there, but they don't need to know that!

Later

Glenn