eGov-July-2010-[44-46]-Use Of GIS Can Help Bring Transparency In The Government-Jack Dangermond

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IN PERSON

Jack Dangermond

Founder and President, ESRI

“Use of GIS

can help bring

transparency in the

government” Jack Dangermond is regarded as a global authority on GIS and is Founder and President of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) he established way back in 1969. He has been recipient of numerous honours and awards and of at least ten honorary doctorates. During his recent visit to India, egov Managing Editor Shubhendu Parth caught up with Dangermond to seek his vision on GIS applications and

I

t’s been over 40 years since you set up ESRI. How has GIS evolved during the years?

In 60s and 70s, it was totally project-oriented. And I can say that today, although then we strongly believed that ‘it’ was the product. It wasn’t until 1982 that we released the first version of ArcInfo, which actually encapsulated all of the work that we had been doing for 12 years that could be shipped as a volume product. That changed everybody’s perception about GIS. During the 80s, there was an exponential growth in the volume we sold, largely to be used on mini computers. When Unix workstations were introduced, we structured our products to run on standalone workstations or on networks. That really helped the product take off. When we migrated to PCs during mid to late 90s, we witnessed a similar phenomenal growth—from thousands of users to hundreds of thousands, and over a million users on today’s desktop environment.

advantages in the e-Governance

How has the Web impacted the delivery of GIS services?

space in India. Excerpts:

About 7-8 years ago we started to introduce products for the Web, and the way I see it is that the Web is the next generation platform. For the last three years we have been re-structuring all of our software to run on the Web as a platform, integrating the whole Web 2.0 logic of ‘crowdsourcing’ of geographic data, mashups and accelerating the usage. The Web has enabled us to connect the GIS specialists—people who create and manage geographic data in various agencies to the whole world, serving maps and even analytics through the web.

What does it mean for the users, and the society at large? GIS, which has so far been a specialised field, will now open up. We can now think of spatially-enabled enterprise tabular data. In fact, we can also spatially enable all the content on the web. It will also help bring about transparency in the government. There could be thousands of applications that could be built on top of this infrastructure. In the past GIS has, at times, been seen as a niche technology that is proprietary in nature, and is focused on certain kinds of applications. What’s happened with the introduction of server is that we paid a lot of attention on building server-based

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egov / www.egovonline.net / July 2010


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