March 2009
GIS can address the intangible 'change'
Lawrie E Jordon III
Director of Imagery Enterprise Solutions
ESRI Inc., USA
Tell us about your
association with ESRI
Jack Dangermond and I are
friends for 30 years. Both of
us went to the same school -
Harvard University, where GIS
technology was actually born.
For about 20 years, we
worked on many strategic
business partnerships when I
was with my previous company.
We were very successful
together providing imagery
and GIS solutions. In 2001,
we merged our company with
Leica Geosystems and I
stayed on for a couple of
years by agreement and then
took an early retirement to
spend time with family. After a
while, I was missing GIS and
imagery and getting bored. I
started as a consultant then.
After two-three years, Jack
asked me to join ESRI full
time and I am grateful to him
for asking me to come on
board at a higher level. I am
happy that I got re-engaged
with exciting projects and
meeting old friends.
What strengths do you
bring to ESRI imaging
division?
My background and first love
is imagery and remote sensing.
This is the area I have
been involved for 30 years
and my strong belief from the
beginning has been that
imagery is a core component
of GIS and is not a peripheral.
In the past, there was imagery
- raster, pixel, image processing
versus GIS - topology,
ArcInfo. They were two separate
worlds. I feel both of them
go together and GIS is incomplete
without imagery. They
are like two sides of a coin,
where GIS informs imagery
and imagery informs GIS. This
is what I would like to focus
upon at ESRI. I am happy to
see there are a good number
of people at ESRI having
strong imagery background.
We have tremendous amount
of expertise in imagery and we
have made great progress in
adding image capabilities to
the mainstream product,
ArcGIS. It is very imagery
friendly already and we have
planned new expansions in
our imagery suite including
imagery server extension.
Is this focus on imaging
taking ESRI in a new
direction?
This is not a new direction. It
is continuation and expansion
of our vision all along that GIS
is a unified technology that
brings all geo-information
together. So imagery is a natural
subset of our whole direction
and emphasis. Our customers
are keen to see more
image integration into ArcGIS.
So we are delivering additional
capabilities to expand GIS. I
wouldn't say it's a new direction
but acceleration.
Is ESRI planning to
make its own image processing
modules?
There are two things; in the
past, ESRI had a strategic
relationship with ERDAS and
that stayed as a successful
business partnership for many
years. Along with that, there
are many other companies
with whom ESRI has partnered
successfully. We, at
ESRI, rather than focussing on
competition with other companies,
work towards fulfilling
the user needs and ensuring
success of the user. ESRI has
many common clients with all
other companies out there,
including ERDAS, and the primary
focus is to deliver the
best to them. We have core
capabilities in imagery that we
are expanding. It is important
to point out that we also have
very strong strategic partnerships
with other companies
that provide imaging solutions
to us that we don't need to
reinvent. For example, ITT
ENVI has outstanding image
processing capabilities that
are easy to use with an interface
called IDL. We are also
working with other software
providers like BAE System
(SOCET SET solution) and
ICube.
So will ArcGIS contain
photogrammetry tools?
We look to our partners to
provide specific solutions and
provide other core solutions
ourselves. Working with recognised
leaders in verticals is
always our preferred
approach. It is important that
there are image servers and
image extensions natively that
provide strong image processing
capabilities as well. So we
now have imagery friendly
package where users do not
have to go outside his/her
working environment to do
many other imagery related
things like image data management,
catalogue management,
serving imagery
throughout the enterprise,
doing some functions actually
in near-real time on the fly like
mosaicing and orthorectification.
It's like magic in the
pipeline. We will not reinvent
anybody else's work. We
encourage customers to look
carefully at the solutions in the
market and I think customers
are quite capable of making
their own decisions. The overarching
scene for us is that
imagery is part of GIS, tied
together with geodatabase. In
other words, it is the geodatabase
centric model and this is
different from image processing
package.
What are the changes
you foresee in data collection
technology?
Data collection is dramatically
increasing. This could be correlated
to Moore's law. You
have an exponential increase
in the volume, quantity, speed
and performance and at the
same time a significant reduction
in the cost of some of
these technologies. We see,
especially in imagery, dramatic
increase in the quality and the
quantity in the timelines of the
imagery and this is what people
want - something easy to
get and easy to use. There is a
huge increase in the data
sources of imagery. About 50
optical satellites have been
scheduled for this year. This
explosion is good for the
industry. On the technology
front, we see a trend of moving
the information tools closer
to the sensors so that when
the information comes to the
user, it is already in the form
they need. This is where the
image server and SOA (service
oriented architecture) can
play a key role. With a set of
raw pixels, you define a service
definition and when the
fresh imagery comes in, it is
automatically delivered in the
way you need it without corrupting
and disturbing the
source data.
You said GIS is
addressing the intangibles.
Can you elaborate?
One of the greatest intangibles
is the uncertainty brought
about by change in environment
over time. The challenge
is the sustainability of our
environment and what we are
doing to take care of this and
what GIS can do. We see GIS
as an enabling technology to
support sustainability because
together imagery and GIS can
provide not only visualisation
of what is happening in terms
of climate change, biodiversity
and impacts on every aspect
of society, it can also analyse
that change and provide solutions
to address the problem. I
think GIS is changing the way
we think, act and make decisions.
More and more we see
that people, not just GIS specialists,
around the world are
actively involved in using GIS
together with imagery to
understand the changes
around and are trying to minimise
the impact on the planet.
What do you expect
from the technologies
the way they are coming up
with better resolution - spatial
as well as spectral?
There are two aspects of this -
one is the temporal aspect.
The fundamental strength that
good GIS tools bring to this
topic is the 4th dimension -
time. It is about the ability to
visualise how changes happen
in 3D over time and this is an
area where imagery contributes
significantly because
it is temporal and provides
fresh new views.
As far as spatial resolution
goes, I would like to cite a
point that was published in
one of the papers and I think
we all would agree upon that.
It says that there is strong
argument to be made that you
come out ahead and better if
you have multiple sources of
imagery of different resolutions
- spatial and spectral as
opposed to one super high
resolution imagery focus on
one thing. You actually have
more information content from
lower resolution data sources
when you have a variety of
sources that you can look at
and work upon. You can actually
gain more information by
having less spatial resolution.
The ability of an information
system to combine different
resolution datasets brings
strength to the table. I would
always argue in favour of
more information in as many
different ways and at the
same time I want smart information
tools that can near
down the data to meaningful
interpretation quickly. This is
what I would like to refer to as
'allusion of simplicity'. It takes
a lot of science to take a complex
set of data as multispectral,
hyperspectral, LiDAR etc.
and turn them into useful
products. It is not much about
ground resolution.
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