Great success for the sole Italian participation at the the Exhibition Hall of the 26th ESRI International Users conference! Mappamondo GIS staff presented to a wide audience its products and services receiving very positive feedback! We think we had one of the cutest booth too!

The 26th Annual ESRI International User Conference was held from August 7 to August 11, 2006 at the San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, USA. The Conference had an audience of more than 12,000 attendees from across the globe.

The theme of the conference was “Geography and GIS - communicating our world” and focused on sustainability, environment and civilization. In his keynote, President Jack Dangermond cited increasing population growth, resource consumption, development and globalization as some of the issues contributing to the problems of our world. To face them we need a better understanding of processes that are involved in natural and social dynamics as well as to develop sense of responsibility and engagement. GIS is a tool to assist science, logic and analysis for better and informed management decisions.

ArcGIS 9.2, ArcGIS 9.2 Server, Image Server and ArcWeb Services were demonstrated and discussed. Dangermond said that ArcGIS 9.2 is one of the biggest, most productive releases ESRI has ever embarked upon. It promises better productivity, less bugs, many new tools for intuitiveness and ease, more content. It has standards based interoperability and support for multiple standards including OGC, ISO, DXF and KML.

Hundreds of technical workshops covered topics ranging from cartography tips and tricks to application development with .NET and Java at introduction and advanced levels.

The Map Gallery showcased a large display of Hurricane Katrina maps, images, testimonials and screenshots provided by users in the field, visual impact analysis, high risk property profiles, voter participation, property tax, natural resource planning, calculating wildfire hazard levels and many displays of conservation GIS, including those from the Society of Conservation GIS, Jane Goodall Institute, and the Orangutan Foundation.

The Exhibition Hall hosted more than 200 exhibition booths being represented by service and products providers for the GIS community or a variety of applications and end users.

Thousands were the user presentations in the several sessions.

Conference proceedings are available at: http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc06/track.html