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Submit your abstract now

Play a major part in the foundation of next year's ESRI UC. Share your GIS story by giving a presentation at the conference.

Professionals across industries and with all levels of GIS experience are encouraged to submit an abstract for possible presentation at the 2009 gathering. The deadline for submissions has been extended to November 14, 2008.

Internet service will be available in all session rooms for anyone who plans to demonstrate Web services or portals during their presentation. Plus, all users who present their work at the 2009 ESRI UC, Education User Conference, or Survey & Engineering GIS Summit can have their presentations published on the Web and in the conference proceedings on DVD-ROM.

Questions? Visit www.esri.com/uc or write to us at uc@esri.com.

Submit abstract

Both gathering and imparting knowledge is what makes the ESRI UC worth the trip for thousands of users from all over the world.

Whatever your industry, position, or level of experience with GIS, we encourage you to submit an abstract for possible presentation at the 2009 conference.

Wireless Internet service will be available in all session rooms for anyone who plans to demonstrate Web services or portals during their presentation. Plus, all users who present their work at next year's ESRI UC, Education User Conference, or Survey & Engineering GIS Summit can have their presentations published on the Web and in the conference proceedings on DVD-ROM.

Have any questions? Visit www.esri.com/uc or contact us at uc@esri.com to find out more about the event and the submission process.

Before you know it, the 2009 ESRI UC will be upon us—submit your abstract today.

The deadline for submissions is October 17, 2008.

We can't wait to read about your GIS story and insights.

Enjoy the exciting 28th Annual ESRI UC all over again or for the very first time. The complete 2008 conference Plenary Session from August 4 is now available in a four DVD packaged set. Whatever your industry, position, or level of experience with GIS, you'll find value in having this memorable and important resource on hand.

The four disk set ($29.95) includes

• Disk 1 - Welcome Address by ESRI President Jack Dangermond
• Disk 2 - ESRI GIS technology trends and demonstrations
• Disk 3 - ESRI GIS awards and innovations
• Disk 4 - K-12 presentation and Keynote Address by Dr. Peter Raven, renowned botanist, biodiversity expert, and president of the world-class Missouri Botanical Garden

Visit the ESRI Store to make your purchase today.

Be sure to watch the blog and www.esri.com/uc for updates about the 2009 ESRI UC, July 13-17.

Order now.

Hear the story of one young girl-encouraged by an educator-who used GIS and ended up illustrating the power of one when it comes to GIS in education. 

Bob Coulter, director of the Litzsinger Road Ecology Center at the Missouri Botanical Garden, and Molly Paterson, a middle school student from University City, met during the Garden's summer learning outreach program, LIONS (Local Investigation of Natural Science).

Listen to Molly describe the demographic analysis she conducted that summer and into the school year using GIS technology. Hear firsthand how young people applying
GIS in education can be connected with their communities and get a better understanding of the world.

Users like you can help students, educators, and parents alike discover the power of the geographic approach in many settings," said Charlie Fitzpatrick, K-12 education industry solutions manager, ESRI during the 2008 Plenary Session. "And nothing is as important as the personal touch for that."

Visit the ESRI Speaker Series Web page and check out the 2008 ESRI International User Conference Plenary-GIS in Education podcast to learn more about Bob and Molly's experience and be inspired to become a mentor yourself.

"Amazing" was a popular descriptor uttered by wide-eyed attendees of the ESRI UC Plenary. The works of GIS users around the world were highlighted by ESRI President Jack Dangermond. Illustrating the conference theme "GIS: Geography in Action," Dangermond talked about the importance of GIS as part of the solution to the challenge of living in a sustainable world.

New functionality and capability enhancements in the recently released ArcGIS 9.3 were put into contexts of developing GIS integration, applications and technological solutions, and infrastructure that supports communal exchange. To do so, ESRI presenters demonstrated software advancements.

ArcGIS Desktop Enhancements

ArcGIS Desktop improvements were described including functionality that simplified users' tasks from keyboard shortcuts, to reverse geocoding, to converting graphics to features. Capabilities for sharing by connecting the desktop project to the GeoWeb showed the ease of consuming ArcGIS Online content, exporting KML, and using GIS-enabled PDFs.

Prediction of growth was modeled using the new Geographically Weighted Regression tool for statistical analysis. Michael Parking of MIT demonstrated 3D visualization improvements through an impressive campus facility management application. An ESRI technician explained values rendered from an ArcLogistics analysis, which modeled how organizations could save hundreds of thousands of dollars using intelligent fleet management strategies.

ArcGIS Server Drives WebGIS
ArcGIS Server improvements were dramatized via working scenarios. A federated pattern of shared applications and data was applied within a situational setting in Louisville, Kentucky, that described how new-generation Web 2.0 principles and practices engender Web-based communities of hosted services. This, in turn, gives rise to the capabilities to use content from multiple map services and create mashups for ad hoc, federated, and enterprise applications.

Integrated GIS and image server technology was demonstrated using German applications from the Bavarian Forest Service and the Hamburg Fire Department. The integration allows GIS users to perform dynamic processing in the server, serve it up to an image service, and deliver it into a standard GIS for display, analysis, and visualization.

GIS Awards
The most important component of a successful GIS is not the software but rather the people who use it. "In 2008," said Dangermond, "one-quarter million organizations used ArcGIS in their work, which has been a spectacular endeavor. From this group, ESRI expressly acknowledges 150 outstanding users by conferring its Special Achievement in GIS award."

In addition, Dangermond presented specific awards during the Plenary. The Enterprise Application Award was presented to the State of Qatar, Centre for GIS for its holistic integration of GIS across the country. This was accepted by Mohamed Abd Elwahab Hamoud.

The President's Award was given to the City of Philadelphia for multiple uses of resources and data. It was accepted by Jim Querry, director of enterprise GIS,

The Making a Difference Award honored two recipients. The first were Rósario C. Grustide Pérez and Ramón A. Pérez for research about urban poverty in the barrios of Caracas. The second was awarded to the U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne who announced the USGS' latest action to make 75 years of Landsat information freely available for worldwide consumption. Read more.

Looking Ahead

"I believe that GIS work is driving change and is creating a digital foundation by abstracting data, models, and workflows," said Dangermond. "Our thinking is becoming spatially integrated, changing how we reason, defining patterns of our actions, evolving collaborative structures. Moreover, GIS is changing our work to adopt a science-based approach. We are introducing systems for measuring, accounting, and analyzing geography, then visualizing it to make decisions. GIS is helping people plan for a more sustainable world. GIS is raising awareness."

Dangermond described how GIS is enacting change within IT user communities. "Today's GIS implementations follow three patterns, the Desktop for creating and editing data, the Sever for sharing information to a wider audience, and Federated systems, which join together server technologies for collaborating and sharing information across organizations."

Dangermond continued, "These three patterns provide a foundation for a fourth pattern-Web GIS. This pattern provides new opportunities for leveraging your work through Web applications. It is about harnessing the power of the Web with all the power of what you do in GIS-going far beyond simple mapping or visualization and ultimately becoming a part of society's infrastructure. GIS professionals will be implementing this infrastructure by authoring and serving knowledge, maps, and visualizations as well as analytic interpretations and authoritative applications. These will be consumed by casual users leveraging our collective knowledge.

GIS for a Sustainable World

During the afternoon session, representatives of the Missouri Botanical Garden explained their work and how GIS is helping to achieve its mission. Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden's Litzsinger Road Ecology Center, Bob Coulter, described the Garden's learning outreach program. A participant of that program, Molly Paterson, a graduate of 6^th grade, Flynn Park Elementary School, showed off her ethnicity demographic analysis of neighborhoods in University City, Missouri.

Dr. Peter H. Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden, delivered the Keynote Address, in which he described the environmental diversity of the planet and the challenges for humans to live in a sustainable world. He illustrated the many problems we face with growing populations, altered landscapes, over-consumption, and climate change. These are rapidly altering the face of our environment.

The Garden's research scientist Dr. Trish Consiglio explained how the research lab uses GIS to put its enormous database to work by combining grid analysis, verifiable identification, and regression computation within GIS. From this, she presented a model for predicting species relationships within areas where little is known.

Raven concluded, "Technological tools, such as GIS, bring to bear a proper understanding of these problems and a proper solution. It helps us in our endeavors to develop love and concern for other people. These tools equip us to turn from passivity toward active engagement in developing much needed solutions."

Every year and every release, ESRI focuses on making many small improvements to their ArcGIS family of software products. Small changes often make large savings in time and productivity as well as increase the quality of the software. Below is a summary of the 10 most popular enhancements made to ArcGIS 9.3 just presented during the Plenary Session.

10. Bookmarks are now accessible at the top level menu to make visiting common places faster and easier. Additionally, the bookmark manager has been redesigned allowing you to rearrange the bookmarks in the order you want, and you can save and load your bookmarks to a file to share between map documents with other users.

9. Pause labeling allows you to temporally suspend drawing of labels while you navigate about the map and perform other tasks. You can return to labeling with a single click of the button on the toolbar.

8. Keyboard shortcuts allow you to step through time series data; for example, just hold the ALT key as you turn on a layer and it turns off the previous layer, or you can use the same functionality to switch to a completely different map and a different set of layers.

7. Clipping a raster or an image to a graphic shape can be useful for defining a study area as a graphic shape—then use that shape to extract or clip a terrain model to your study area.

6. Working with transparent legends in 9.3—transparency is often used to improve the cartography of the map, when the brightness of the map does not match the brightness legend—there is a new option in the dataframe properties to simulate the layer transparency for all legends.

5. Regarding table sorting, aliases, and joins, there’s a new sorting option which allows for the sorting of multiple columns. Table joins now have aliases persisted—you no longer have to recreate field aliases after you perform a join.

4. On the Geocoding toolbar is a new option called the Address Inspector, which allows you to move your mouse and hold it down as you move around the map. It will automatically calculate the nearest address to that location and mark it and the address on the map. It also works for cross streets and intersections. For those who are using addresses and want to label addresses on a map, this process has been automated and streamlined.

3. On the drawing tool bar, you can now take graphics and automatically convert them to features. You can choose which graphics you’d like to convert, and they will now be converted to a feature class with all the attributes and symbology intact. This means that you don’t have to go out and create a feature class before adding feature—you can add graphics and convert them after the fact.

2. Identify shortcuts and HTML popups by using the identify tool to change the color of a building footprint. For example, rather than searching the TOC for a particular layer, you can now select a feature on the layer, right-mouse click on the identify properties and get right to the layer symbology. HTML popups can be turned on for any layer, and they allow you to see the attribute information in a nicely formatted window—along with a leader line, which always updates to the map location. This can be used for custom content like Web pages as well.

1. Quality is always a focus for ESRI but with 9.3 a new error reporting system has been implemented that allows users to send error reports directly and anonymously to the development team. The system also identifies where in the software a random crash occurred. ESRI has spent a lot of time reducing the number of crashes, but if you should encounter a crash, please send the report so we can continuously improve our software.

Geographic server technology now makes it possible to better integrate imagery into the core of the GIS. This technology was demonstrated at the 2008 ESRI UC Plenary Session. Presenters Peter Becker and Mark Romero gave examples of how people in Germany are using ArcGIS Server to tightly integrate imagery within a complete GIS. The capabilities of this integration were showcased in two examples, the Bavarian Forest Service and the Hamburg Fire Department.

The first example showed how the Bavarian Forest Service served 2 ½ TB of imagery to their 3,000 users. This included color and infrared imagery and raster datasets such as rasterized LIDAR. They showed image services returning terrain height values into ArcMap, slope and aspect maps, and a shaded relief rendering of the surface model that displayed the tree canopy details.

An image service created by subtracting the terrain model from the surface model enabled the direct measurement of tree heights. These different image services used the server's processing ability to generate multiple products from a single data source, without the requirement to pre-generate the image products.

Imagery integrated into GIS enables users to include data rasters in ArcMap to display tree canopy details.

In a demonstration of the workflow, presenters showed how to update the color image service using an IKONOS satellite image, which was quickly added to the existing service and re-published. The orthorectification, pansharpening, and mosaicking was performed on-the-fly. The same imagery was then published as a 4-band OGC WCS service and accessed by ITT-VIS's ENVI image analysis application. The presenter showed how a wizard could extract images of areas with un-healthy trees and then return the images directly into ArcMap.

The second set of examples was based in Hamburg. The presenter showed how Image Server technology was able to orthorectify Pictometry's oblique imagery and display this within ArcMap. The application enabled users to see in 3D different sides of buildings and make height measurements.

 The Hamburg Fire Department combines imagery and GIS to create ths risk analysis of areas in the city where unexploded WWII bombs remain a threat.

The last example was about how the Hamburg Fire Department uses image archives for risk analysis of unexploded World War II bombs. They have created an image service that contains many georeferenced reconnaissance images that were taken during missions flown more than 60 years ago. The tools then enabled the analyst, for any area, to look through the photographs taken at different times and digitize the location of all craters that indicated bombing activity.

The image server technology enabled fast access and review of this temporal data. They also showed how the swipe tool could be used to make comparisons between the historical imagery that was dynamically mosaicked together and new color ortho-imagery. The new color-imagery used was actually streamed over the Internet from an image server located in Germany that was dynamically mosaicking the imagery together from the original source imagery.

WWII aerial photos of Hamburg were digitized for a GIS mosaicking project. A swipe tool compares landscapes of past and present eras.

The presentation effectively demonstrated how imagery can be dynamically processed, mosaicked, and served to any client through image services. The tight integration of imagery with GIS technology improves workflows for collection, management, and production tasks. Users can then exploit the richness of this integrated imagery.

Learn more about how integrated server-based GIS can help you get connected at ESRI's ArcGIS Server Website.

The integration of multiple services into an application, a process known as a mashup, allows for a GIS application to bring together basemaps, operational data, and analytical services to create simple to complex applications that provide information and solve common tasks.

The community of the World Wide Web supported by ArcGIS Server technology has opened up a variety of methodologies and patterns for consuming, authoring, and serving geographic information. Through Web technologies such as REST and JavaScript, critical patterns of mashups for geographic applications emerge. The following mashup patterns were presented to the audience of GIS users in the ESRI UC Plenary Session this morning:

• Ad Hoc
• Enterprise Integration
• Inter-Organizational
• Federated Basemaps
• Analytical Modeling
• Interoperable

Each of these mashup patterns were defined and exemplified through a series of demonstrations. The ad hoc mashup is a combination of base maps and operational data to create simple applications like a public safety application where citizens would be able to report a public nuisance by selecting the type of incident they witnessed-then click on the map where the incident was observed.

An enterprise integration mashup is where many departments within an organization contribute content to the mashup application. For this example, a Tampa Bay city basemap was used and many of the city's departments provided map services so that citizens could have visibility on the city projects near or around their homes or other addresses of interest.

Enterprise integration mashup for the City of Tampa Bay can help citizens locate tree trimming projects near their homes.

 The next demonstration was an inter-organizational sharing mashup. The presenter created a mashup drawing from base maps and operational data from different organizations. The example showed the operational data of a utility company on top of an imagery basemap. The purpose of the application was to find parcels near a customer's address, but the parcel information is being maintained by one of many different cities.  A parcel map service for the appropriate city is brought into the map and then the utility company can perform its task of building a list of parcels that are near to the customer.

The federated basemap mashup pattern is employed by many different organizations that contribute content to the mashup application via map services. The presenter showed how a federated hydrology map of Texas was composed of content provided at many different scales from the different cities.

A researcher using an analytical modeling mashup pattern chains together operational data and analytical services, meaning the output from one service is used as the input for the next service. In this example, the user initiated a chained mashup to create a historical perspective of past flood events in Austin, Texas. Buildings and other assets, which may be affected at a particular time of a flood event, could be useful for the hydro-analysis component of the disaster study.

The Federated mashup pattern was used to compile data from many Texas cities to author a hydrology map for analyzing past flood events near Austin.

Finally, the pattern of interoperable mashups combines operational data and analytical services on top of commercial basemaps. The presenter demonstrated how a drive time analysis geoprocessing service on top of an ArcGIS Online basemap could show one, two, and three minute drive times from a location. That same analysis was quickly run on top of multiple commercial basemaps of Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

"The collaborative and sharing aspect of the mashup application is very exciting to us at ESRI," says ESRI President Jack Dangermond. "It is what we and our user community have been working toward for the last 15 years. The collaboration and sharing of data will present endless opportunities for the building of important GIS applications."

Learn more about mashups and test drive live, interactive demos.

During today's Plenary Session, the attendees were treated to a live ArcGIS Mobile presentation. Outside the convention center, several ESRI staff posed as Mobile workers collecting information about various assets and their condition, while inside the center, the audience was captivated as the Web browser was continuously updated. Each time the view refreshed, that data was available to the presenter for viewing and editing.

In the past, Mobile workers would collect data in the field, and that data would have to be re-entered into the office systems, resulting in costly time delays and data quality issues. ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS Mobile eliminate these problems associated with older field data collection workflows. Now field and office staff are saving time by capturing data once-at the source-and also achieving a much higher level of accuracy and quality control.

Are you ready to try it for yourself? Users who have a Windows Mobile 5 or 6 touchscreen device are encouraged to try a similar application to the one that was demonstrated. See the instructions on installing and using the ArcGIS Mobile Client to record interesting locations around the Gaslamp District.

Learn more about Mobile GIS.

The ability to model complex spatial relationships and to predict spatial trends are important for planning and decision making. Regression analysis, new with ArcGIS 9.3, provides effective tools for exploring, examining, and measuring spatial relationships, identifying key factors contributing to particular spatial outcomes (like urban growth), predicting future scenarios, and illustrating, through cartographic visualization, the impacts of policy and proposed urban planning projects.

Two regression techniques Ordinary Least Squares Regression (OLS) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) have been added to the 9.3 Spatial Statistics toolbox. OLS is the best known of all regression techniques-it provides a global model of the variable or process you're trying to understand or predict. GWR provides a local model that accounts for spatial variation in model relationships.

By using these new tools together to identify, measure, and model spatial relationships, you're in a better position to understand what's going on in a place, to predict where something is likely to occur, and to investigate why things occur where they do. There's a variety of applications and markets for regression analysis including:

• Public Health: Why are diabetes rates exceptionally high in particular regions of the U.S.?
• Public Safety: What environmental factors are associated with an increase in search and rescue event severity?
• Transportation: What demographic characteristics contribute to high rates of public transportation usage?
• Education: Why are literacy rates so low in particular regions?
• Market Analysis: What are the predicted annual sales for a proposed store?
• Economics: Why do some communities have so many home foreclosures?
• Natural Resource Management: What are the key variables promoting high forest fire frequency?
• Ecology: Which environments should be protected to encourage reintroduction of an endangered species?

During today's Plenary Session, Lauren Rosenshein, a solutions engineer at ESRI, demonstrated the capabilities of regression analysis for predicting urban growth in Northern Virginia, one of the fastest growing regions in the country.

The demonstration took advantage of three new tools in 9.3. To start the analysis, Lauren used one of the new graphing tools, a scatterplot matrix, which looks at the relationships between variables in the data. The scatterplot matrix helped find some of the best variables to use in a regression analysis of urban growth. 

Once the variables were chosen, both OLS and GWR were used to explore the data and understand the phenomenon of urban growth. In the case of urban growth, GWR provided a better prediction, and the results of the analysis were used to predict growth in the future. The results were also used to evaluate planning decisions such as the extension of the mass transit system, by rerunning the model to determine how the extension would affect growth. 

ArcGIS Spatial Analyst helps the researcher see how the proposed metro will affect the need for schools predicted to grow.

The demonstration showed how the advances in spatial statistics in ArcGIS 9.3 can help you understand and predict complex phenomena and make better decisions.

Find out more about Regression Analysis in ArcGIS.

Learn more about other tools in the Spatial Statistics toolbox:

• 911 Emergency Call Analysis 5 minute demo
• Virtual Campus Free Web Seminar