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From New York to Brazil to Dubai to even South Korea, nations and governments, are embracing the idea of “smart cities.” In an era when human civilization is rapidly marching towards an instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent future, Jack Dangermond’s Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) is poised to be the bearer of this progression. Headquartered in Redlands, California, Esri produces Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and geodatabase management applications used by more than 350,000 organizations worldwide to create 150 million new maps each day.
Although believed to be in its infancy, GIS has long aided cities to improve operations and manage their systems of record. It provides the framework and process to bring together and manage all the data into an abstraction that people can understand, visualize, and share. According to Dangermond, “GIS is a framework that allows us to plan the future.”
Owing to the inflating challenges from expanding populations, loss of nature, environmental pollution, and urbanization, the world is growing more unsustainable. These challenges can be addressed if cities are more efficient and better planned by leveraging the best of science, technology, design, and strategy. Esri’s GIS technology propels the world toward a ‘smart’ future.
GIS is being used to implement smart city concepts by connecting, integrating, and exploiting various datasets of a city to create more integrated understanding and management. Its services’ architecture is robust enough to bring together all types of information to support cities that are instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. While speaking about the inevitability of GIS, Dangermond says, “All citizens, and particularly the next generations that will inherit critical urbanization challenges, need to have an understanding of GIS so that they can engage in applying this system to create solutions for humanity.”
With undeviating focus on creating an evolutionary platform, Esri has delivered a series of sequential products—ArcGIS 10.x— which has been evolving and transforming GIS to suit today’s web services environment.
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GIS is a framework that allows us to plan the future
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