Essential Information for IT Professionals

GIS Solutions

Mapping Geography With Information Technology

ArcGIS is a scalable system of software for geographic data for every organization from an individual to a globally distributed network of people.

Built out of modern object-based components, the range of ArcGIS software products shares the same application core, user interface, and operating concepts. After you learn one, you'll easily understand how to use the others. If you extend one, your custom tool or application works with the others. This makes ArcGIS easier to learn, teach, program, and support.

Business partners also provide value-added work flow solutions built on top of the core ArcGIS tools. The core tools and capabilities found in ArcGIS provide a foundation for our partners to build such solutions.

• Business Partners
• Corporate Partners

ArcGIS is a robust, open platform built on an architecture that will be the foundation of ESRI software for years to come.

The geodatabase is a rich, multi-user data management environment that supports efficient storage and use of all the common spatial data types (vector, raster, images, survey, topology, etc) in a high performance environment.

• View demo: Windows Media [4:00]
  This overview describes the five key elements of the geodatabase used to assemble an intelligent GIS:
  • Maps and Globes
  • Geodatasets
  • Metadata
  • Data Models
  • Processing and Workflow Models

Creating a Digital Earth of Spatial Information

ESRI has pioneered GIS network architecture that goes beyond enterprise GIS to support the cross-cutting needs of our society as a whole. The pieces include

• A strong server platform for GIS applications that integrates into service-oriented architectures (SOAs)
• A metadata portal
• A collection of clients that can consume and integrate data from various servers

The ArcWeb Services framework is emerging as a key platform for distributed, multivendor interoperability. The GIS Portal Toolkit is opening the door for GIS software to dynamically integrate mapping, data, and geoprocessing services from many servers and integrate them into a common environment.

This Web server-based architecture will provide a multiparticipant GIS framework that will allow collaboration between governments and communities (multiagency/multiorganization) to implement

• A global spatial data infrastructure
• GIS application fusion