Day 2: ESRI UC San Diego

09 August 2006, 10:50pm

Day 2 brought diversity: a walk through the exhibition floor speaking to vendors and interviews.

The computer running the show is a Stratus FTServer 4300 2-way DMR. It is providing web services for the conference, ArcGIS Server, Oracle with SDE, serving DHCP, DNS and active directories. It does some printing too!

Apparently it keeps running if components fail. Maybe I should ask to test that tomorrow? Nah...I need to do some other things.

One product that caught my attention was GeoMarc. Watermarking images is a way to mark an image in an unidentifiable manner. This is done to protect copyright, track leak detection (who is leaking documents) or as a means to include image access protection.

GeoMarc is cool - and slick. The owner of an image may select portions of images and black them out. Imagine having one image being served, but different people can see different portions of the image based on their access right, which is encoded into the pixels.

DDS is giving away a ArcGIS Quick Reference Card. Everyone needs one of these things - if you use ArcGIS.

Map Intelligence is a product by Integeo, it provides spatially enabled dashboards. A high level of geovisualisation in this product, including graphs and charts for looking at data trends.

Go to the ESRI website. In the search box type in "DSMAPBOOK.ZIP". Unzip it and run it. It will create a grid on a map - among other things. It prints to PDF or a series of grids also. I am told this is an non-documented added feature.

Go to the Applanix booth. Look at the display there which shows the details of an airborne image sensor mission operation. This provides a good example of what digital sensor systems are about.

RapidEye is a new satellite system that will be available in the near future. This company recently opened north of Berlin, Germany. You can meet their representatives and learn what this system is all about - 5 satellites imaging every point on the earth every day!

You can't actually buy the CJMTK, but if you worked for a US defense agency you could probably use it. This is a ultra-high level interoperable Toolkit using off-the shelf products. Worth a look.

Adonis Kontos runs ESRI Greece and that is where the ESRI European Conference will be held soon - in Athens. I figure everyone at the San Diego conference should come visit us in Europe...

Rex Miller has some interesting software that integrates CAD and GIS data. He is at the Civilsoft booth.

Visit PIXIA. These people are very polite and helpful and I really liked talking to them and learning about their product - which I placed in our 'News'.

Warren Vick of Europa Technologies is at the show once again. If you look at Google Earth you will see the name Europa Technologies. Warren is a happy and easy going person and has data from Europe and elsewhere.

I normally deal with Cyber City AG in Switzerland, but they do have an office in Los Angeles. If you want to see great 3D city models, then check them out.

The USGS displays upstairs are simply cool. Check them out - professional work here.

I bet I have almost every ESRI employee business card in the world. Hmmm. No kidding.

xPlore Technologies has their mobile rugged computers on display. Ask for Suzanha

The Media Wall 2000 from RGB Spectrum is very interesting and useful. It combines numerous displays into one panel.

I found out today that Intermap is almost done mapping Germany for elevation. I can't wait to see the results.

I met with the folks from Lizardtech today. The company announced its new GeoExpress 6.1 version (I reviewed their 6.0 version recently). The thing you should know about this version over the last, is that this version includes the ability to place GML metadata into the image. This also includes non-uniform color balancing. It is one thing to color balance one image. It is another thing to color balance a series of images. It is the later which this product now does, meaning you get one seamless realistic looking picture. Justyna can help you out at the Lizardtech booth.

Oh yes - don't forget to take pictures in the Map Gallery, it is easier to move around after opening day.

Good luck and have fun tomorrow.

geoconnexion.com

Jeff Thurston

Editor