- Author: Shane Feirer
The last day of the ESRI User Conference was as informative as the first. I attended several different sessions covering several different topics. The first session I attended was about smart mapping. Smart Mapping is a new set of tools that are being integrated into ArcGIS server and ArcGIS online. These tools are intended to take the make the creation of beautiful maps easier and allow the GIS professional more flexibility and creativity.. From what I have seen smart mapping does what ESRI intended. The next session that I followed was a session about advanced regression and spatial regression analysis using ArcGIS. They have improved on the previous set of existing spatial statistics functions available in ArcGIS and I look forward comparing these new tools to those available in R. The last session that I attended was about 3d cartography. This session highlight the principles of creating impactful 3d scenes with ArcGIS Pro, Scene, and ArcGIS Online. I look forward to using these techniques and tools at IGIS.
In summary the 2015 ESRI User Conference was a great event as always. ESRI is rolling out many innovative applications and tools that are making sharing data and information easier. These tools will allow UCANR and IGIS to work with our constituents and provide our research in an interactive and fun manner. As I have stated numerous times over the last week, I look forward to implementing many of these new tools in the coming weeks and months. I hope that I have the opportunity to attend this conference again next year.
- Author: Sean Hogan
The second day of the 2015 ESRI User Conference in San Diego has officially come to a close, and what a great day it was. Wherein the first day featured the shock and awe of key note speakers and plenary presentations, the second day consisted of a vast assortment of exhibits and specialized break-out sessions.
Much like the first day, we saw a huge push towards the new ArcGIS Professional platform. As soon as they work out some of the bugs that occasionally cause it to crash, it should be an amazing leap forward in terms of making GIS work flows more efficient. Nonetheless, sorry longtime ArcGIS users, most of the buttons and leavers in the new Pro version are in different locations and will make it feel like you are learning a whole new program from scratch. That said, for first time GIS users, ArcGIS Pro's Windows-like interface will probably be more intuitive than the old ArcGIS desktop environment.
Other highlights of the convention include a large assortment of exciting new apps that ESRI has either recently released or are putting out soon. Among these are some of its new mobile data collection apps, such as Collector (for field collections of points lines and polygons), Survey 123 (for conditional geospatial survey questions), as well as software development kits (SDKs) to create your own custom mobile applications. These, in addition to ESRI's other new apps, fully integrate with ArcGIS online and ArcGIS for Server, to facilitate enterprise database operations and maximize data collections for organizations.
Other exciting developments include the soon to be released ArcGIS Earth application, and the growing number of templates and analytical tools currently available through the ArcGIS Online platform. The ArcGIS Earth app looks remarkably like Google Earth, however it will instead include the rich pool of ESRI's online data, while at the same time allowing you to represent your own data in stunning 3D.