Blog

By Shankar Lakshmanan, GIS Software Developer

The Snow*Mobile conference was held earlier this year in Madison, Wis. There were interesting presentations on how various web and mobile technologies are helping and empowering people. Here are outlines of a few talks that stood out to me as interesting and informative.

By Kelly Fisher, Senior Development Manager

If you have an interest in GIS, gardening, and sustaining the environment, then permaculture may be for you. Permaculture is designing a self-sufficient environment for a network of people, from a community or city down to a single family. The practice of permaculture results in using natural resources in a sustainable way to produce a surplus and not introducing anything that will negatively impact/harm the environment, such as pesticides, invasive/non-native plants, etc.

According to author Toby Hemenway of Gaia’s Garden, the five main steps in designing an ecological garden is to observe, visualize, plan, develop, and then implement. GIS can be used as a helpful tool in completing these steps, particularly the first three.  

By: Jonathan Pollack, Senior Vice President

I recently returned from GIS-T in Boise, Idaho. In addition to a great conference, I discovered that Boise is a wonderful city. The conference was very well attended with representation from more than 40 states. I find this conference refreshing, as nearly all attendees are focused on learning from each other, sharing their ideas and, solving the mutual challenges they face in the transportation arena. The GIS-T staff did a great job this year and having the ASIS conference run concurrently was an added bonus; these are exciting times in the GIS-T space.

By: Dave Thieme, MCSD, MCDBA, FCP, JCP, Solutions Architect

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is commonly used to document system requirements in order to describe as-is and to-be business activities. In UML, a use case describes actors and the activities they perform. An actor can be a specific user role within an organization, a customer or business partner, or even a system.

By: Doug Argall, GISP, OCA, Senior Database Administrator

Late last fall, I was contacted by friend and former colleague, Albert Sarvis, who now heads the Spatial Technology program at The Harrisburg University of Science and Technology based in downtown Harrisburg, Pa. He asked if I’d meet with one of his students to give an overview of spatial databases, and I gladly accepted. Following this meeting, Albert and I continued discussions to possibly expand this into a full spatial database development course. Just a few weeks later, I found myself back in a classroom for the first time in almost 23 years fulfilling one of my life’s ambitions… to teach.

By: Thomas G. Ries, Senior Project Manager

A Look at the Remaining Three Key Enterprise Integration Needs

In my previous post, I concluded that I thought Esri^® Roads and Highways (R&H) was on the right path for addressing two of five key enterprise integration needs: (1) services-based architectures and (2) data integration during data maintenance. In this post, I will cover Esri R&H and the remaining three key enterprise integration needs: linear location integration, temporal integration, and resolution integration.

By: Nohyun Myung, Technical Architect

In part one I discussed understanding the differences among disaster recovery, high availability, and failover. If you missed part one, you can read it here.

In this post, I will address the in-depth challenges organizations face and possible solutions to overcome these challenges when developing a disaster recovery (DR) plan. Some of these challenges include lack of metrics and analytics, cost, and relating the impact.

By: Adam Conner, Senior Developer

If you’ve been following along, you’ve seen the previous three posts about the 2013 Esri^® Developer Summit. Days three and four consisted of many different types of presentations, from users and Esri staff alike. Here are my highlights from those last two days and a final summary from the event.

By: Adam Conner, Senior Developer

Day two of the 2013 Esri^® International Developer Summit is now on the books, and it began with the Plenary. I watched the plenary while reviewing the #devsummit hashtag on Twitter to see what everyone was saying. It was easy to notice, and the Twitter crowd confirmed my feelings, that the presenters were saying the word “platform” about two times per minute. At one point, one of the presenters even said it mockingly, acknowledging the fact that it was getting comical. That being said there were a lot of great topics covered during the session. Here are a few that I was most excited about.

By: Adam Conner, Senior Developer

The 2013 Esri^® International Developer Summit is officially underway, but the 2013 Esri Partner Conference is still winding down. The evidence of this strange crossover conference day can be found on Twitter. It also means that the Developer Summit Plenary Session is on the morning of day two. That will be the plenary session when all of the new features of ArcGIS 10.2 will be discussed and how all of the APIs and SDKs have been simplified and enhanced to take advantage of 10.2 features. Today, we heard all about those features and changes, and how they will be released in June 2013. We don’t get to see it all at once until tomorrow in the plenary. It seemed like day one was a warm up, and Esri didn’t expect everyone to arrive in Palm Springs until tomorrow. So what did we see and hear on day one?