If you are a geospatial enthusiast, then you will know about the annual Esri User Conference, where the San Diego Conference centre gets filled out with thousands of Esri users for the week. It is truly an experience to be believed and one that every geospatial person who has used the Esri software, should experience at least once in their lifetime.
There is one event that Esri holds, which is lesser known is the Esri Developer Summit. Many don’t attend or listen because it brands itself only for developers, but dig a little closer and there are some very interesting things to be found bubbling beneath the surface.
This year’s Summit didn’t fail to impress with some very interesting news that many will not get to hear about until the User Conference. If you want to get ahead and know some of those news before the User Conference, then here are some of the highlights:
- The new animated flow renderer in the ArcGIS API for JavaScript showcased stunning new ways to visualize magnitude and direction in multidimensional raster layers. You can see the talk here: https://mediaspace.esri.com/media/t/1_1wf8y676
- Although we have already heard about the new Esri game engine SDKs (software development kits) at the dev summit we got a more in-depth look and also get to see Mapman running about a real Esri data created environment and if you watch to the end, some buildings applauding (yes you heard that right!)
You may see the talk here: https://mediaspace.esri.com/media/t/1_wypx4uz6 - On day two, we got to see ArcGIS Knowledge and Knowledge Graphs being demonstrated in ArcGIS Pro. These allow for more detailed spatial understanding to be able to investigate relationships in the data. In the example, it is used to understand how supply chain disruptions impact the entire network, exploring the impacts of material shortages and regional outages.
You may see the demonstration here: https://mediaspace.esri.com/media/t/1_0hdryffh - When it comes to smart cities and IoT, nobody makes it look easier than Esri. At the Dev Summit this year, there was an amazing demonstration of ArcGIS Velocity using IoT and utilities data.
Talk is here: https://mediaspace.esri.com/playlist/dedicated/250241443/1_jzw4qgwy/1_7xj0q3ej - GeoBIM is a word on everyone’s lips at the moment and the relationship between AutoDesk and Esri is getting stronger. There was an interesting talk on using CAD and BIM in GIS https://mediaspace.esri.com/media/t/1_kss39t66
- Day 3 explored how you can extend and automate the ArcGIS system and take advantage of new improvements in spatial analytics, though the first talk focused more on DevOps and the CI (Continuous Improvement) and CD (Continuous Development) pipelines and infrastructure. An extremely interesting watch if you ever wanted to know how the internals of the Esri Enterprise works, awe-inspiring!
Here: https://mediaspace.esri.com/media/t/1_9u81t3nz - The Dev Summit allows for more information on some of the more technical areas, one that I was excited to hear more on is the Geospatial AI (GeoAI). The demonstration given covered everything from the pretrained models in the Living Atlas, through to an analysis on a refugee camp. If this is an area which interests you, it is worth giving the talk a look: https://mediaspace.esri.com/embed/secure/iframe/entryId/1_8gctm893/uiConfId/49028003/pbc/250241443/st/0
- Finally, there was an announcement on the new GeoAnalytics On-Demand Engine, a new product for data scientists that brings spatial analytics to big data by leveraging native Spark in the Cloud, including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, if I understood it correctly, this AaaS (Analytics as a Service) engine will have 100+ spatial tools on day 1 release Talk here: https://mediaspace.esri.com/media/t/1_s25v31bk
