Event Report: ESRI 2006

The theme "Geography and GIS: Communicating Our World" was repeated throughout the 26th Annual ESRI International User Conference, appearing on attendees' tote bags and in ESRI President Jack Dangermond's plenary session address. On the opening day of the event, held August 7-11 in San Diego, Dangermond discussed the role of GIS in solving political, social and environmental problems. He stressed the importance of bringing geography into the mainstream, revitalizing educational programs and battling the geographic illiteracy plaguing American schoolchildren today. A presentation by 4H members showcased the projects students can undertake when empowered with GIS, from mapping the spread of wildfires and invasive weeds to changing school policy with a spatial analysis of crimes committed near middle schools.p>

The plenary session audience also watched a demonstration of ESRI's ArcGIS 9.2, scheduled for release this fall. ESRI is expanding CAD interoperability in ArcGIS: Version 9.2 is being developed with expanded CAD property support, adding CAD elevation, entity rotation, CAD layer symbology attributes and others; improved default CAD feature rendering; and new CAD feature dataset organization. A georeferencing toolbar allows users to move, rotate and scale CAD files using the mouse. Additional features include full support for TrueType fonts, CAD integration with Survey Analyst, and improved annotation and style matching and support for standard CAD annotation. ArcGIS Server - which is a complete server-based GIS within ArcGIS 9.2 - improves collaboration between CAD and GIS, easing tasks such as sharing geodatabases with AutoCAD.  Read more >>

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