Redlands, California—At the upcoming 26th ESRI International User Conference in San Diego, California, ESRI will be showcasing its commitment to building an open and interoperable geographic information system (GIS) platform.

“GIS is inherently collaborative, and ESRI users must be able to easily work in heterogeneous computing, GIS, and data environments,” says Jack Dangermond, president of ESRI. “ArcGIS 9.2 and the GIS Portal Toolkit are engineered to be open and to support OGC and ISO standards. I believe our users will be pleased with the enhanced OGC support, whether they are single users or large organizations deploying a service-oriented architecture using ESRI technology.”

Several new interoperability improvements in ArcGIS 9.2  and in the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension will be shown and discussed at the upcoming User Conference (August 7–11, 2006). These include ArcGIS 9.2 support for OGC WMS, WFS, and GML Simple Features on both the client and server. ArcGIS 9.2 also embraces the ISO 19139 metadata standard. In addition, there is greatly enhanced support for reading, exporting, and working with CAD drawings from AutoCAD and MicroStation.

The ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension is also updated with FME 2006 GB, the latest release of the core Safe Software engine. This release enhances support for many of the existing formats including OGC GML Simple Features and adds support for several new formats including Google Earth Data Exchange (KML), MapInfo TAB (replaces old MapInfo TAB reader), tabular data, ESRI geodatabase (file-based), ESRI ArcGIS 9.x layer, and GML 3.1.1.

ESRI is currently finishing support for the Web Coverage Service (WCS) and is developing an application that supports WFS-T as part of ArcGIS Server. These developments will be included in ArcGIS 9.2 or will be available shortly thereafter.

Some standards organizations that ESRI actively participates in include OGC, ANSI/INCITS L1, ISO/TC 211, and OASIS.

In addition to enhanced standards support, ESRI’s open architecture supporting spatial extraction, transformation, and loading; hundreds of direct read/write data formats; KML; CAD-GIS data sharing; various data models; SQL access to the geodatabase; open APIs (Java, .NET); SOAP/UDDI/WSDL; and openly published data formats of shapefile and geodatabase will be shown at the 26th ESRI International User Conference.

For more information about ESRI’s commitment to standards and interoperability, visit www.esri.com/standards.