There are two big thoughts I would like to share — how COVID-19 is accelerating change and impacting our cities and environment, and how geospatial technology can help overcome the great challenges our planet and societies face today.

Technology acceleration during crises

It’s been suggested that in times of a great social crisis, the adoption of emerging technologies is accelerated. For example, some urbanists think that the pandemic of 1918 accelerated the adoption of automobiles. People first started envisioning using cars to live in suburbs to avoid dense urban housing and public transit, changing the fabric of our cities forever. Today, emerging digital technologies are changing our cities and our ways of living. The digital infrastructure is transforming how we work and live. Consider the acceleration of e-commerce, home delivery, autonomous vehicles and the new forms of collaboration with tools like Zoom.

Digital and geospatial infrastructures

Digital infrastructure and geospatial infrastructure are rapidly becoming a fundamental part of our cities and lives. This will ultimately change the way cities are organized and managed. Further, GIS is transforming the geospatial infrastructure, acting as an interconnected network of distributed systems supporting a multitude of apps and enabling the dissemination of geographic knowledge everywhere. This infrastructure pattern is already in use within emergency response organizations, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and in states and localities. Maps and content are dynamically being served and brought together on demand from many sources, with various kinds of apps.

This geospatial infrastructure is leveraging the vast network of organizations that are already creating geographic knowledge. This distributed knowledge is increasingly becoming available, and eventually will become pervasive. The Johns Hopkins map is a good example. Its services have been embedded in thousands of other systems and apps that have helped in educating our society.

Creating common understanding

Geospatial infrastructure is enabling a whole new era of maps and language of understanding. While GIS started with specialists, today, maps are dynamically served to millions of users through browsers and mobile devices. Almost everyone can easily access stories and republish knowledge about everything. With the spread of online maps, often published as story maps, real-time information about everything is being made available through the medium of digital maps. I like to think of it as ‘geo journalism.’

“Geospatial infrastructure is enabling a whole new era of maps and language of understanding. While GIS started with specialists, today, maps are dynamically served to millions of users through browsers and mobile devices.”

Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of TED, suggests that one of the big failures of modern society is that individuals and institutions don’t effectively explain things. He believes that using maps is an effective way to communicate and understand, and so, geospatial infrastructure can help make the world more understandable. As we think about our future, we need to leverage geospatial infrastructure and geodesign to transform our institutions and society with better understanding of the consequences of our actions.

Pressing challenges

Today, we are facing many challenges concerning climate, racial and gender equality, biodiversity, and education, among others. The United Nations has created the global indicator framework for the SDGs to address these issues. They are using mapping and GIS to communicate these indicators through a geospatial lens. This will elevate geographic and holistic thinking. At Esri, we continue to focus on advancing geospatial technology and aspire to build tools that help people do their work better.

Vision of Digital Twin

The term Digital Twin came out of the manufacturing industry and is now used to describe geospatial technology. While its origin is the engineering discipline, it is also useful in describing GIS information models and their applications. For me, the vision of Digital Twin is exciting, especially with reference to a living data model that is dynamic and is transactionally updated. In that sense, an urban GIS is a Digital Twin that integrates content and workflows from across the enterprise. At a different level of scale, GIS users around the world are rapidly digitizing and creating a Digital Twin involving hundreds of millions of datasets. Over time, the geospatial infrastructure will integrate all of them.

Innovation for AEC

We have worked closely with Autodesk, our strategic partner. They see our technology and GIS in general as highly complementary. This has been a very fruitful relationship for us, with multiple interconnected technologies. This year, we are integrating our respective Cloud platforms and more dynamically and seamlessly integrating their BIM- related workflows with our GIS data, supporting advanced visualization and workflows.

Opening up the power of ArcGIS

This year, Esri released ArcGIS as a platform service. The new offering, called ArcGIS Platform, is a complete and rich geospatial platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and represents comprehensive content and very powerful location capabilities, including high quality basemaps, imagery, geocoding/ search, routing and many more, all ready to be used by developers. The ArcGIS Platform also includes over 7,000 demographic and physical geographic layers as part of the Living Atlas. The platform is designed to support the millions of developers who wish to produce maps or do more sophisticated geographic analytics easily.

Partnering with large and small enterprises

Esri’s strategy for success involves its partners. They focus on workflows and applications that support specialized efforts around our system. Some do simple mapping and integrate our base maps and imagery, or do simple geocoding. At the other end of the scale are large enterprise platform partnerships with IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP, Amazon, and others. Some of these companies consume our services as commodities, while others go beyond the basics and leverage our more advanced capabilities. Our experience of working with the tech giants has been good. It has been gratifying to see them coming to the realization that location matters and embracing the geospatial framework.

COVID-19 is accelerating digital and geospatial transformation. For Esri, our users and partners have been significant players in this transformation. Our ongoing vision is to build geospatial technology that helps the world understand, communicate and provide innovative solutions that both help not only with the recovery, but also make the world a better place.