Unlocking Technology's Promise
The second day's prime attraction was the starting keynote by 'technology forecaster' Daniel A Burrus, President and CEO of Burrus Research Associates, USA. "We all underutilize many of the tools we have access to" - was the start of Daniel's thought-provoking speech. It traversed technical areas, philosophical issues of organizational growth and touched aspects of mindset change for the spread and reach of geospatial sciences. He stated that, for people and groups yet to be initiated into the geospatial domain, one needs to talk to them in their language and for their problems, rather than talking about GIS at the start.
He covered important issues and gave a succinct description of the state of affairs with information age. Daniel emphasized that the use and application of the technology as a direct function of the problem statement of any area is the correct measure of geospatial technology penetration.
100% Club Awards
There were 6 awards presented to Intergraph products and services users during GSW04, who have used technologies by Intergraph to the fullest in value chain and have been successful in their case implementation. The award was handed over by Halsey Wise and presided by Preetha Pulusani, Bart Hoogenraad and Arthur Spencer from Intergraph. The following were the recipients of the awards:
- DTE Energy Gas/Michlon
- Northern Virginia Electric cooperative
- Prague Energy
- Rappahammock Electric Cooperative
- Sacramento Municipal Utility District
- The Empire District Electric company
Preetha Pulusani advocated the need for a new mindset that is required for experts in GIS or even users - 'to stop isolating GIS.' "GIS is mainstream and an integral part of any process that tries to visualize complex inter-relationships of data or information with a specific purpose of generating intelligence. GIS needs to be amalgamated into workflows of government”
The Sessions
The technical sessions were conducted simultaneously in 14 halls of the hotel and covered the areas of - 'Foundation, Commercial Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Solutions, Regional and Local Government Solutions, National and Federal Government Solutions, Military and Intelligence Solutions, Transport Industry Solutions, Utilities and Communications Industry Solutions'. Aspects of Data integrity, Data reuse, View generation, Process flexibility, Scalability, etc were presented. Interoperability was discussed specifically in a number of sessions.
Various local and regional government departments made case presentations. The exhibition area had over 30 exhibitors from across the globe and saw huge surges of visitors in the afternoon peaks. 'Demo Theatres' and 'Ask the Experts' sessions had debates, immediate solutions and demonstrations spanning various topics from 'image rectification' to 'basic SQL formation'.
The Geospatial World 2004 had an attendance of about 1200 attendees representing 66 countries. There were about 220 presentations in all, including Customer and Intergraph presentations. There were sixteen Education Symposium sessions in the three days and eleven Pre and Post Conference Training Seminars.
