ESRI and Interoperability

Blogger and OS CTO Ed Parsons described Jack Dangermond's vision of the future this way.

There is a clear vision developing around the concept of the Geoweb, a network of both GI clients and servers which offer the potential to democratise not just geographic data, but also geographical knowledge as represented by the publishing of spatial models or the mounting of analytical task based servers, the ability for example for a server in Australia to process data on a server in the USA, for display on a PDA in England.

So how realistic is this vision and how committed are ESRI to it, well ESRI as a private company have more latitude in their ability to make statements about the future than a public company, so words are cheap - however there are a couple of things that really make me think this is serious.

Firstly ESRI have put so much effort into building the necessary services technology over the past couple of years, literally thousands of man years..

To get there, Parsons concludes, interoperability is required.

The second hint is much less explicit, but is just as telling.. to make this vision work you need interoperability between systems and data, not everybody after-all is going to be using ESRI software.

For a number of years ESRI have offered I believe only lukewarm support of the OGC, and OGC standards, quite rightly in some cases being critical of some elements of them.. recently things have changed, you hear the OGC mentioned much more by ESRI staff and ESRI are much more active in the OGC helping to fix the things they think are wrong.