News | February 11, 2004

ESRI President Delivers Keynote Address at Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Conference in India

Intelligent GIS Supports Building of Global Spatial Data Infrastructure

Redlands, CA - ESRI president Jack Dangermond delivered a keynote address during the opening session of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure 7th International Conference (GSDI 7), in Bangalore, India, entitled "Intelligent GIS Supports Building of Global Spatial Data Infrastructure." ESRI is the leading developer of geographic information system (GIS) software.

In his address, Dangermond said that GIS is the foundation for building a Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI), which can make a significant contribution in dealing with the many worldwide challenges confronting our leaders today.

Dangermond emphasized the role of serverside GIS to deliver the essential parts of spatial data infrastructure (SDI) including Web services, portals, intelligent geodatabases, models, metadata, and application servers.

Dangermond indicated that ESRI enables interoperability for the component parts of SDI by building its software based on information technology and GIS community standards. He noted the emergence of a federated system of GIS networks that will constitute GSDI, will be based on the work of the international GIS community.

At GSDI 7, ESRI demonstrated the OGC Interoperability Add-On for ArcGIS that delivers Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), and Geography Markup Language (GML) to the ArcGIS Desktop products (ArcView, ArcEditor, and ArcInfo).

These can be added to the ArcGIS Desktop products as standard image and feature layers. Using the OGC Interoperability Add-On, ArcView, ArcEditor, and ArcInfo can also write out any feature layer as a GML document and add those GML documents to any map viewer.

ESRI continues its long history of supporting standards within its family of software products. The OGC Interoperability Add-On for ArcGIS is available at no cost from the ESRI Interoperability Technology Download Center at www.esri.com/standards.

About ESRI
For more than 30 years, ESRI has been the leading developer of GIS software with more than 400,000 clients worldwide. ESRI software is used in all 200 of the largest cities in the United States and in more than 60 percent of counties and municipalities nationwide. Headquartered in California, ESRI has regional offices throughout the United States, international distributors in more than 90 countries, and more than 1,600 business partners. ESRI's goal is to develop comprehensive tools that enable users to efficiently manage, use, and serve geographic information to make a difference in the world around them. ESRI also provides consulting, implementation, and technical support services. ESRI can be found on the Web at www.esri.com.

Source: ESRI