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26th Annual ESRI International User Conference
The 26th Annual ESRI International User Conference was held from August 7–11, 2006 in San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, US. The Conference had a captive audience of more than 12,000 attendees from across the globe.
"Communicating our World" was the message Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI, presented to the opening plenary, where he stressed "Our world needs better understanding, and GIS is the medium that helps us communicate and understand our world." Dangermond described his vision for shared geographic data environments to GIS software users who came to the User Conference from around the world. He used the plenary to show the many ways that ESRI’s software development strategy supports a shared environment with the goal of making GIS for everybody. Another innovation ESRI staff demonstrated was the geodatabase archiving that allows one to record and display changes over time along with the new animation tools to create, playback, and export animations and animated graphics. A real world application showed historical changes in statistics of children afflicted with asthma. Another dataset showed historical data about air quality in the areas where these children reside, and yet another dataset showed addresses of afflicted children in proximity to freeways. Bringing the datasets together in GIS to produce an animated historical map that showed changes in asthma cases, air quality, and freeway exhaust made correlations obvious.
In the GIS Awards Ceremony, The Presidential Award was given to Ordnance Survey of Great Britain that was accepted by Dr. Vanessa Lawrence, Director General and CEO. Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Dr. Larry Smarr, Director, California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology, University of California, San Diego. Distinguished Service in GIS Award was awarded to the following recipients - Dr. N. Vijayaditya, Director General, National Informatics Centre of India, Dr. Vandana Sharma, Sr. Technical Director, National Informatics Centre of India, Lt. General James R. Clapper, Jr., U.S. Air Force (Ret.); Former Director National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).
The Map Gallery in the conference had hundreds of beautiful and informative maps. Special non-poster displays included a physical terrain model of Canada's Province of British Columbia and Rascal 20, the SciAutonics all-terrain self-navigating vehicle that competed in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.
A huge exhibition, with adjoining space for networking and lunch was organized within the same venue. On the exhibition floor there were approx. 200 exhibition booths being represented by who’s who of the GIS community. Exhibitors showcasing their products in the field of GIS, GPS, Printers & Plotters, Aerial Photography and what not shared the exhibition floor. Hundreds of exhibits showed how GIS is being applied in the myriad of applications & Situations. It was just the right place for networking and interacting with the end users.
On 7th August 2006 at the eve of ESRI User meet, GIS development hosted a dinner reception at MASALA, the spice of India an authentic Indian restaurant. The Reception was attended by 45 high profile guests from the geospatial industry.