2020 Esri UC – First Virtual Conference and Opening Plenary

Normally approximately 17,000 people attend Esri User Conference held in San Diego, California but this year, the conference has attracted upwards of 80,000 people online as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. While it is sad not to be gathered in San Diego, the sheer volume of people who are able to participate online makes it quite a phenomena for Esri, a 50-year-old company spearheading the GIS movement globally.

CEO and president Jack Dangermond, as always, delivered the plenary address in which he thanked all users for their work, adding, “I don’t think this will be our last year of going virtual.”

This year, GIS and geospatial definitely has its work cut out for it with the Covid-19 response and all the ripple effects of that disease and the ensuing social problems, unemployment and poverty. In past years, GIS has addressed many disasters, global and climate challenges, sustainable forest management, urban design and planning, transportation planning and management, public safety and emergency management, vulnerable populations, and more.

This year the 2020 Making a Difference Award went to Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems, Science and Engineering for their work on the Covid-19 virus data tracking, mapping and monitoring.

The President’s Award went to the Regional Municipality of York, Ontario, Canada, due north of Toronto.

Normally approximately 17,000 people attend Esri User Conference held in San Diego, California but this year, the conference has attracted upwards of 80,000 people online as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. While it is sad not to be gathered in San Diego, the sheer volume of people who are able to participate online makes it quite a phenomena for Esri, a 50-year-old company spearheading the GIS movement globally.

CEO and president Jack Dangermond, as always, delivered the plenary address in which he thanked all users for their work, adding, “I don’t think this will be our last year of going virtual.”

This year, GIS and geospatial definitely has its work cut out for it with the Covid-19 response and all the ripple effects of that disease and the ensuing social problems, unemployment and poverty. In past years, GIS has addressed many disasters, global and climate challenges, sustainable forest management, urban design and planning, transportation planning and management, public safety and emergency management, vulnerable populations, and more.

This year the 2020 Making a Difference Award went to Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems, Science and Engineering for their work on the Covid-19 virus data tracking, mapping and monitoring.

The President’s Award went to the Regional Municipality of York, Ontario, Canada, due north of Toronto.

As always, an inspiring message is set forth by Mr. Dangermond “Interconnecting our World – creating and understanding,” and he notes that it will require our best understanding, communication and collaboration to deal with the problems of the world today.

Increased collaboration among the world’s organizations is being seen as more information brings more people together.

“The vision for ArcGIS is to build a comprehensive geospatial platform,” said Dangermond. “That supports multiple communities, GIS, a downsized version of GIS in location services and analytics. It includes a geoenabled system but with built standalone, independent systems for indoor management, public safety, general software and software as services in the cloud – the combination of these is the geospatial cloud that Esri builds. In addition, a record keeping system, system of insights – analytics to explore GIS, a system of engagement, maps that connect with people and tell stories. All three of these systems will be increasingly able to integrate real time data, from the field, and space.”

ArcGIS supports multiple implementation patterns, so users can do work on different platforms, cloud services pattern like ArcGIS Online, and the geospatial infrastructure pattern brings them all together.

“There are many new advances this year. ArcGIS includes an enormous amount of data from ArcGIS Online, thousands of layers to which you have access and can integrate into your own work, and allow other users to use,” said Dangermond. Among the advances are adding POIs, new thematic data like landcover forests, rich biodiversity data, more temporal data, and the integration of the OpenStreetMap environment directly into the system. “You have direct access to global geographic data for about just about everything.”

The success of this shared environment is evidenced by the billions and billions of maps made each week.

Smart mapping embedded into the work environment allows people to make interesting maps without difficulty. There are new tools for symbology, annotation and processing, map graphics added onto displays in mapping in cartography, color management for the offset printing world, automated map and chart production, enhancements to the workflows and performance. These extensions will ship with the regular ArcGIS Pro release in a few weeks.

New features collections will take a group of StoryMaps and put them together into publication, optimized for mobile so you can quickly make a StoryMap with one click. Users across the organization can have the role of storyteller. GIS implemented into SharePoint, BI and other platforms allow embedded maps to change workflows.

Dashboards make dynamic visual reporting a reality, and can be put onto mobile devices and any device anywhere anytime, and are among the new improvements in mapping and performance.

Spatial analysis and data science, which are the heart and center for most GIS professionals – now have over 2,000 tools to support data engineering, visualization and exploration, and spatial analysis. The new suitability modeler, and predictive modeling capability have been used extensively over the course of the Covid-19 response.

Jupyter notebooks have been integrating these materials into the ArcGIS platform for the last several years. “Last year we introduced a specialized server for ArcGIS Enterprise, and now we’re implementing Jupyter notebooks inside ArcGIS Pro,” said Dangermond. “This means you don’t have to do anything, it is just there, scripting, processing and automating your workflows. Also we’re releasing an extension to ArcGIS Online that implements Jupyter notebooks that includes Python libraries that Esri has built but it also opens up to Open Source libraries you can use directly.”

Through the introduction of Jupyter notebooks you can work with Open Source libraries and open science ecosystems to have access to those libraries of AI, machine learning and deep learning.

These capabilities are not a separate system; they’re all integrated into your GIS.

Integrated Imagery Exploitation with ArcGIS Excalibur is a new capability introduced this year for transforming analyst workflows. Much of this capability will be moved over to ArcGIS Online, which will be able to store imagery in there. Excalibur can exploit the images, search and pull them into your project and share and report from there.

For Drone Mapping, SiteScan is new and does the same thing as Drone2Map but now on the cloud, with fleet management and flight planning built into it.

A new way to view the 3D information of ArcGIS which begins with a rich 3D data model is through a gaming engine. Another area that Dangermond was most excited about was Volumetrics and voxels – “think of a fish bowl and see into it. That’s what voxels allow you to do, see interpolated values in the fishbowl.”

New capability in Real-Time Visualization and Analytics is supported as completely cloud-based with sensors wired up to the Cloud, that also does spatial temporal analytics, that now can easily implement real time data and massively scalable information dealing with hundreds of millions of actual observations.

Data Management and Editing are central to GIS, with advancing tools, workflows and data models supporting all leading systems and platforms but introducing new geodata models using a services environment, improved editing tools, introducing lease adjustment in the Pro release, and COGO and workflow management enhancements.

Esri has been rethinking how they store and organize their data, so the data editing and management capabilities will be modernized for workflows such as utilities, parcel data management and roadwork and pipelines.

Field operations are supported by ArcGIS that are location enabling all aspects of field work, starting with planning and managing, helping people get there by advanced real-time navigation, with maps in the field in disconnected and connected environments.

Location tracking and finally data capture, inspections and surveys, have been done with Collector and Survey123, and recently Esri introduced QuickCapture, a simplified version of Survey123. “This summer we’re releasing a new app called the FieldMaps App, an integrating app that brings tracking, mapping, navigation and feature capture all into one environment,” said Dangermond. “Everyone working with field work will receive this app.”

In the area of server technology ArcGIS has the ArcGIS Enterprise, a comprehensive system that users use in their own infrastructure or clouds. At the end of the year it will run on something called Kubernetes operating system. This will mean ArcGIS will be able to run in cloud native  environments, leveraging advantages of cloud native computing, including distributing and scaling out. Along with this release will come new tools for streamlining installation and update. It will mean dynamic scaling ability, easier maintenance of your platforms, more IT friendly integration with the other IT systems.

ArcGIS Online, mapping analytics and location intelligence, grew 400 percent in the last quarter.  This year it will be extended with Analytics for IoT, which will be a companion to ArcGIS Online.

ArcGIS Hub, a system for collaboration and engagement, extends ArcGIS Online and empowers citizens with GIS capabilities, not just the ability to organize communities or organize initiatives for communities.

ArcGIS Solutions are free and will be downloadable this summer.

GeoCards is a relatively recent addition to ArcGIS App Builders that allows building blocks to be built, services and data, can put in dashboards and websites sharable.

App Studio was once only was available to developers but now is open to all users. This supports cross platform native app creation; employs ArcGIS runtimes and you can then build your app around it.

ArcGIS for Developers allows developers to extend base functionality of the product in several ways, by using technology to plug into game engines. JavaScript API is the most popular API that supports dynamic analytics and visualization in a browser environment.

A fifth API for all sorts of developers is being made available later this year, with open source open layers,  leaflet and more with a rich access to GIS as a platform. There will be a new series of location services sort of like ArcGIS Online but packaged for developers.

Geo-enabled systems support focused workflows such as Indoors (indoor mapping & GIS for asset, space and building management), Business Analyst (data driven decision making), Urban Planning (system for planning and managing urban development) and Mission.  ArcGIS Mission provides tactical situation awareness and collaboration, peer to peer communication, planning, execute and manage capabilities.

In the future, Dangermond said that Esri will be changing the name of ArcGIS to ArcGIS 2021.

In closing, Jack Dangermond noted that Esri supports more than software development but also supports professional development which are evidenced in the various educational and technical sessions held all week. GIS and geographic science are evolving rapidly to become geospatial infrastructure.

“Your collective work is becoming a powerful force creating and applying geographic knowledge everywhere,” said Dangermond. “You will be increasingly essential as the world evolves.”

Plenaries, and keynotes can be found on YouTube

Tags: air pollution, ArcGIS, climate change, cloud, crowdsourcing, data, ESRI, geospatial, GIS, imagery, indoor mapping, Infrastructure, intelligence, location, mapping, OpenStreetMap, reality modeling, satellite imagery

Categories: 3D Cities, 3D designs, analytics, ArcGIS, ArcGIS Earth, ArcGIS Online, ArcPad, asset management, cloud, cloud network analytics, Covid-19, data, emergency response, field GIS, geocoding, geospatial, GIS, image-delivery software, lidar, location based sensor fusion, location based services, Open Source, remote sensing, resilient cities, sensors, spatial data, subsurface utilities, transportation

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