Digital Earth Weblog

It was an interesting day today. I attended a morning session that covered some more case studies. Some very good work has been done. The middle of the day was all Jack Dangermond, who judging by the crowd’s reaction lived up to expectations. The afternoon was all ESRI Australia doing their thing.

The morning session that I attended was focused mostly on data management issues. The talk was about geodatabases, data models, and ETL (extraction, transformation and loading). A few presenters even got into some detail about what they had done, which pleased my geek side. (Most of the presentations were focused on “business benefits”, not the details.)

Strangely, tacked onto this session was Sean Skilton from Sun who went through another presentation on service oriented architecture (SOA). I thought his explanation of what SOA is was quite good. However, as before, there was no details given on how you migrate to a service oreinted architecture, or what some of the issues are. The big services companies obviously want to do that for you, and have you pay them to do so.

All that conference attendees got was that that the spaghetti created by N to M web service connections get moved to a new layer in the architecture (which others referred to as the Enterprise Services Bus) which helps exploit and manage those services without having to write a lot of code. The principle is sound, but no path was offered. Just apply magic vendor glue product and it will all be solved.

I spoke to some of my clients afterwards and they were still not clear on the whole SOA thing. The message seems to be getting lost in a maze of buzzwords.

Jack Dangermond was a breath of fresh air. I had never seen him speak live until today. His passion is obvious. He did a great job of explaining his vision, and articulating where ESRI products fit into that vision (something that had been lacking at the conference). He also had a gentle dig at a few of his own products, which was refreshing after hearing nothing negative about any ESRI product during the rest of the conference. They can’t all be perfect, otherwise we wouldn’t need all the great new things and enhancements in 9.2. I got the impression that he would have liked the ESRI product suite to be a little closer to his vision than it is (that’s my personal perception, your reality may vary).

Yes, ArcGIS Explorer was demonstrated, live. It’s splash screen was labelled “E2”, and Jack Dangermond suggested that it’s name has not been finalised. It looks very good, and Jack mentioned both WMS and WFS (no details given though).

Personally, I’d like to see some of the more gimicky predefined searches disappear. The left hand panel of the user interface is quite cluttered. For example, “Where’s this computer?”. Best case scenario: This will get used once and give an accurate result (it was close when Jack used it, but Brisbane is not Main Beach on the Gold Coast). The worst case is that it will get used once and return a false result.

I’m keen to get a beta copy of ArcGIS Explorer. It shows a lot of promise, and I’d be happy to provide some feedback like I did with Google Earth. As always, data will be what makes or breaks it, and it looks like a lot of the responsibility data serving will left to organisations that have ArcGIS Server. Although, I’m not clear in exactly how this will work other than there is some mechanism to prepare data prior to it being served. It sounds a bit like pre-rendering image tiles to get performance.

The afternoon session was ESRI Australia doing education sessions. I attended the enterprise GIS session and I found it to be 50% sales pitch. This was strange for what I thought was a users conference, so I skipped the last session and went to get some fresh air.

When I got back to my apartment I read the fine print and found that OZRI is formally a “National Client Conference”, not a “User Conference”. I’d agree with that.

So, it’s all over for this year. Would I go again? Hmm… probably not for a few years if it stays in the current format. If it changes to a true users conference I’d be much more interested because I got very little out of it at a technical level. It was good hear what the big vendors are telling their clients, and to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for a while.

All up, when I consider the cost of the conference, the cost of travel and the lost work time, I’d say that I didn’t break even. But hey, that’s just my take on it.

Update: Just to be clear, my company (Digital Earth Pty Ltd) is not an ESRI client. However, quite a few of my clients use ESRI technology. My OZRI posts are written from the point of view of an outsider looking in. Your mileage may vary.