Google has been an amazing benefit for our business. People understand the whole world of mapping and want to do more than not get lost. They want to do spatial analytics. It's been fantastic for us.
What if instead of seeing a neighborhood that reminds you of the place you grew up in, you see your actual neighborhood? The data exists. The technology exists. It's just a matter of sourcing it and processing it in a compelling fashion.
ArcGIS is an integrated Web GIS that is supported by services. These are abstracted in a geoinformation model that's managed by the portal, and then accessible by a number of apps, which are the growing part of this system.
I want to have all that scientific information that we're building be used in designing the future so that people who make geographic decisions - and here it's not just land-use planners, but it's everyone: foresters, transportation engineers, people who buy a house - can analyze all of these information layers and design a future.
Something like 80 per cent of business decisions have a location element. In fact, it's probably higher than that.
Cartography and geographic thinking are cool.
At Harvard, I worked for some time as a researcher in a lab for computer graphics and spatial analysis, which is one of the birthplaces for what we do.
Once you digitize data, you can actually analyze patterns and relationships in geographic space - relationships between certain health patterns and air or water pollution, between plants and climate, soils, landscape.
One of the things that's making ArcGIS come alive is apps. Apps are opening up the ArcGIS platform, making it available to everybody in your organization as well as to the public.
Our intention and aspiration is to continue building out thematic information about every subject - basemaps, imagery, demographics, landscape data, etc. - so anyone can use it to access thousands of authoritative maps.
A lot of data, whether it's imagery or other kinds of things, work really well when it's geographically laid out. I'm talking about imagery, statistics, incidents and other things that happen around the globe.
