The leading GIS software company, Esri, held its annual user conference last month, and I was able to tune in to its plenary sessions online, which provided an insight into how its ArcGIS products were being used in multiple ways across the world in varied domains including agriculture, environment, communication and connectivity, urban planning and transportation, communication and connectivity, disaster planning and management, and more. The ability to map out the world and overlay it with data — which is fundamentally what a GIS application does — seems to be one that is being put to work in countless ways across all fields of human endeavor and is likely to continue doing so.
This article provides an overview of some of the user implementations that were presented at the conference, including those from PCL Construction from Canada, Foster + Partners, the City of Cambridge in Massachusetts, the Netherlands’ Kadaster mapping agency, and the PG&E utility from…