ILGISA - Day 1
As I mentioned in my previous post, I attended the Illinois GIS Association's Fall Conference today and will be back at the conference tomorrow. This fall's conference is in a new venue, Northern Illinois University's Naperville Campus, which has been great so far. The Wi-Fi has been a bit shaky, but it wouldn't really be a conference without that happening. I attended two workshops that were each interesting in their own ways. The morning workshop was led by Dr. Michael Fagel on the topic of practical applications of GIS in emergency response with a particular emphasis on the aftermath of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. Dr. Fagel has a wealth of emergency management experience and was the Ground Zero Site Safety Officer from immediately after the attacks until the following December. To say that his presentation was sobering would of course be a massive understatement, but it was also an insightful look into the fluidity of emergency management and the countless number of issues personnel responding to a crisis deal with. Dr. Fagel had nothing but praise for the GIS personnel who aided in the response. He said that the response would have been far more difficult without the 24 hour a day GIS operation that was set up. The workshop was very thought-provoking for me. The afternoon workshop I attended was given by some ESRI staffers and was essentially a call for users to realize that the time to migrate from ArcIMS to ArcGIS Server is pretty much neigh with ArcIMS being deprecated after 9.4. I'm not sure about other states, but it's safe to say that ArcGIS Server has not been all that widely adopted among local government GIS programs in Illinois. I'm sure the reasons for this vary widely, but this workshop was part of ESRI's continuing effort over the past few years to reach out to users in the state at ILGISA conferences and via other venues to urge them to migrate. The workshop wasn't bad, but I felt that with a focus largely on content from the ArcGIS Server Resource Center that it didn't cover as much new ground as I had hoped. The APIs were clearly emphasized over the WebADF, which for most users is probably the proper emphasis. I haven't dug deeply into them yet, but on the surface I see quite a bit to like about the Flex and Silverlight APIs. The JavaScript API is a different story for me with OpenLayers being a viable option for deploying a JS-based solution. Again, I haven't thoroughly sunk my teeth into the JS API yet, but my impression from a decent amount of OpenLayers experience is that OL makes it easier to work with a wider variety of data formats and is just simply easier to set up and configure. In spite of that impression, I don't doubt that we will make use of the JS API on future projects. I'm looking forward to the open source presentation tomorrow and hope that in spite of a busy day, I have a chance to catch up with colleagues from around the state. Our relatively new state GIS Coordinator will be giving one of the two plenary speeches. I'm eager to hear what he has to say as statewide GIS coordination is something Illinois has struggled with to no end in comparison to most other states. Here's hoping he'll have some good news to share with us.
