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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IN PERSON
Tabular databases are increasingly being spatial-enabled using the server technologies. This can be done in healthcare, for information on epidemics, for project monitoring or allocation of capital expenditure
July 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov
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IN PERSON
Latest in the basket ArcGIS.com: A website for finding and sharing geographic information system (GIS) content, organising geographic information into groups, and building communities. Developed on the lines of Google earth, the web-based tool allows users access a number of free, ready-to-use basemaps for their projects and applications.
applications that can be used not only to manage the geographic data but also as a platform for spatially enabling the rest of the IT organisations. For example, addresses in a file about customers or citizens can be ‘geo-coded’ as dots on a map. These geo-coded dots can be aggregated to give patterns and relationships of a business... where the organisation is doing well, or where it is not doing so well. In government, the same thing can be used to determine the quality of citizen services. In the US, President Barak Obama recently introduced the idea of a transparent government. He has been pushing aggressively to make all development data in government open so that academics, entrepreneurs, citizens and others in the government can have access to. With the release of $780 billion stimulus money, his idea was to show on an interactive map through dots where all that money was being spent. Today, citizens can log on to http://www.recovery.org, zoom to check out what the government is doing for them in terms of expenditure or job. Citizens can also give in their feedback and suggestions. Similarly, in India, the national government provides money to the local
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getting personal QUALIFICATION Master of Science in environmental science from University of Minnesota, and Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design BUSINESS INITIATIVE Co-founded ESRI in 1969 with his wife Laura as a land-use consulting firm TURNING POINT Early work in the school's Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis (LCGSA) led directly to the development of ESRI's ArcInfo GIS software FAVOURITE PASTIME Gardening and garden design
state government, but there are not many officials to keep a track of where the money is being spent and how, let alone having a system that can transparently inform the citizen about the same. Such a map can also help citizens quickly understand the policies of t he government. Many governments around the world are adopting this vision. This is just the first step to opening up for change.
With the form factor of computing devices shrinking by the day, and handhelds becoming more powerful than ever, do you see any major change in the way GIS solutions could be delivered? Part of our server solutions is to support the Web services, like maps and spatial analysis, and they are two directional. For example, I can seek a map or an analysis from a server that is being maintained by any organisation or department to my cell phone. This makes me ‘situation aware’ immediately. In another case, the cell phone itself becomes an extension of the geospatially enabled enterprise environment. What this means is that I can view things and also contribute to the map. In Washington DC, for instance, the community and city government are using cell phones to update information about the condition of water network, which in turn feeds information about the situation on a real time basis to all
concerned departments that are participating in the infrastructure.
So what is your GIS vision for good governance? Tabular databases are increasingly being spatial-enabled using the server technologies. This can be done in healthcare, for information on epidemics, for project monitoring or allocation of capital expenditure. This mapping is more effective than the traditional tabular datasets, because you can actually see where the money is going and its impact, and that is what GIS helps you to do. You can do simple things on consumer sites like Google and MSN and that’s really very good, but the ability to actually connect with the citizens in a transactional environment requires an information system that allows citizen to interact and give feedback. Also, the public and the government can understand and provide performance measurement matrix against the promises on project components and timelines. This is similar to real-time evaluation like in the case of business intelligence and you may want to call it ‘geo-accounting’ for all government projects in your neighbourhood. In fact, this is about using GIS for setting up a system that can make the government, and for that matter, anybody with the mandate to spend money from the public exchequer more accountable. It is also about increasing citizen engagement in government activities.