GIS Bringing it All Together

The 20th European Conference for ESRI Users took place from 26th to 28th October 2005 in the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland. A third ESRI European Education User conference was held in parallel, from 25th to 27th October at Warsaw University of Technology. About two hundred participants from 44 countries attended the conferences.

Jack Dangermond, ESRI president, opened the conference with a keynote address elaborating on the conference theme ‘GIS – brings it all together’. He underscored the importance of GIS and its possibilities, and how data collection and integration creates our knowledge of the world and helps us manage the world in which we live. Prof. Milan Konecny, president of the International Cartographic Association, focused on ICA activities and implementation of SDI in Europe.
David Maguire's session under the banner ‘Technology - Road Ahead’ showed new achievements in technology, ArcGIS 9.2 and evolutionary progress in ESRI products. His talk was supported by demonstrations: cartographic directions, news in ArcPad, possibilities of ArcGIS Engine and new products, including Image Server.
The second part of the plenary session began with a speech from Professor Jerzy Gazdzicki, president of the Polish Association for Spatial Information. His presentation was devoted to GI strategy in Europe and Poland. Dr Marek Ostrowski, who leads the Independent Image Information Study, gave the final keynote address. He focused on special interpretation of aerial photos of Poland, showing details and relationships between nature and urban areas.

User Presentations
Over the subsequent two days ESRI users attended over seventy presentations about GIS solutions and ESRI software usage in many different sectors. Presentations were given along five tracks:

• defence & public safety/emergency response
  
• government & physical planning/environment
  
• energy, utility & telecom
  
• transport and variations on this theme
  
• survey, cartography & cadastre.

There were also really well attended ESRI technical workshops. DHI Water and Environment of Denmark had its own track, focused on water and wastewater management.

Education User Conference
The parallel event, the 3rd European Conference for ESRI Education Users, gathered people involved in using ESRI software for educational purposes. Presentations and discussions showed that GIS was used by much younger people than it had been thought, and that market needed more GIS specialists and professionals from different sectors who knew how to use GIS. Presentations also indicated the possibilities of using GIS for teaching geography and in other faculties. The conference closed with an open lecture by Dr David Maguire about Geographic Information Systems and Science in twenty-first-century Education.

Exhibition and Maps
In total, 37 companies participated in the accompanying exhibition. Exhibitors came from the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Poland, Russia, France, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, Lithuania and Denmark.
Attendees chose the best of all posters submitted to the conference. The winner was ‘Gdansk - ...like the Phoenix from the ashes’ made by the Municipality of Gdansk, Poland.

Tele Atlas, HP, IBM and Microsoft sponsored the conference.

The next European Conference for ESRI Users will take place from 6th to 8th November 2006 in Athens, Greece.