What was the most exciting attraction in the Exhibit Hall at the Esri User Conference 2016? Hard to say, as the 14,000+ attendees flocked to see the plethora of exciting exhibits from third party companies, and of course the numerous demonstrations of Esri products and services. Drones, imagery, field solutions, utilities, navigation, spatially enabled business apps, data management, all vied for an audience at the conference. Esri’s Drone2Map was a huge hit, and Collector for ArcGIS was a product that garnered an enormous amount of attention at its demonstrations and technical workshops, offering the promise of providing mapping to professionals in the field workforce that would in turn, improve the accuracy and currency of spatial data.
The question: what do we do with all this data? Is one that really runs parallel with the theme of this year’s Esri User Conference held in San Diego, entitled, “GIS Enabling a Smarter World.”
Monday’s keynotes at the GEOINT Symposium 2016 held this week in Orlando, Fla. began with an engaging view of global connectivity from global strategist and author Parag Khanna, author of Connectography, Mapping the Future of Global Civilization. His belief is that the world is at the beginning of the “connectivity revolution.” He asked the audience to consider how they might change the way maps are constructed in order to emphasize today’s global connectivity.
At an industry session held at SPAR3D 2016 in April in The Woodlands, Texas, Steve Hutsell, Chief, Geospatial Section U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Seattle District, and Lou Bush, Director of Survey, Bowman Consulting Group, gave a talk entitled: “Integrated Data Capture, BIM, CIM, GIS and CAD – Owner and Industry Perspectives on Products, Processes and Policies for Informed Decision Making.”
Daryl Madden, senior vice president and general manager, Advanced Information Solutions and Geospatial Solutions at Textron Systems Geospatial Solutions of Sterling, Va. spoke with GISCafe Voice about the $13 million corporation’s commercial off-the-shelf products.
Those I spoke to at SPAR3D 2016 last week were amazed at the progress the 3D laser scanning/reality capture products had made over just one year. Many people attended in order to find out if the technology would be right for their organization and what it would entail in terms of a learning curve, and of course, how much it would cost.
The four morning keynotes kicking off SPAR3D 2016 Expo and Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, Tuesday morning included Eddie Paddock, Engineering/VR Technical Discipline lead, NASA Johnson Space Center, Greg Bentley, CEO Bentley Systems, Inc., David Smith, CTO, Wearality, and Curtis Chan, technical evangelist, Autodesk.
Brian Goldin, CEO and founder of Voyager Search and formerly of Esri, recognizes that geospatial systems amass a tremendous amount of data. “A lot of solutions for helping people understand data haven’t evolved very well,” said Goldin. “By taking some modern web search technology and combining it with geospatial data, we can allow someone to install some software for dealing with their data without impacting their work in their existing IT environments.”