Esri and the Scientific Community

At Esri we are concerned with supporting basic and applied science, but we also recognize that there are many major themes of compelling interest to society that will drive scientific research for the next two decades. And thus we view science as helping us to understand much more than solely how the Earth works, but how the Earth should look (e.g., by way of geodesign), and how we should look at the Earth (i.e., by way of Earth observation in varying forms and the accompanying data science issues of analysis, modeling, developing and documenting useful datasets for science, interoperating between these datasets and between various approaches).

There are many major themes of compelling interest to society that will drive scientific research, at least for the next two decades. And thus we view science as helping us to understand not only how the Earth works, but how the Earth should look, and how we should look at the Earth.

Along these lines, Esri is fairly well known as a vendor of GIS technology to research labs, universities, and other places where great science is done. However, Esri continues to work toward contributing as a MEMBER of the scientific community as well. As such, you may not know that Esri maintains objective scientific representation on various scientific boards and councils, including several of the committees therein that do the work of these bodies over the long-term. Examples include:

• the NOAA Science Advisory Board
• various working groups of the National Science Foundation EarthCube Initiative
• the National Academy of Sciences Ocean Studies Board
• the Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information in Science
• the Global Partnership for Oceans Blue Ribbon Panel
• the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners
• the Consortium for Ocean Leadership
• the Science Advisory Council of Conservation International
• the World Ocean Council
• and forthcoming, the Environmental Protection Agency Science Advisory Board

Esri also serves on various advisory boards or collaborative research teams for specific scientific projects. Examples include:

• CyberGIS: Funded by the NSF and led by Professor Shaowen Wang at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, CyberGIS aims to establish a fundamentally new software framework via a seamless integration of cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and spatial analysis/modeling capabilities. In addition, researchers seek to effectively extend the benefits of cyberGIS to science and society in significant ways. The project also involves scientists at ASU, UW, SDSC, and UCSB, as well as Esri, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Map Project, and several institutions in Australia, China, and the United Kingdom.
• Sustainable Sourcing of Global Agricultural Raw Materials: This UC-Davis project, funded by the Mars Corporation, seeks to enhance the sustainability of global agricultural raw materials sourcing across the supply chain. The purpose of this work is to assist food companies and other stakeholders by creating scientifically-validated frameworks and a platform to advance sustainability in agricultural sourcing decisions. It involves a critical review of sustainability issues, best practices and indicators of key dimensions of food system sustainability at various scales (field-level to global). They are developing GIS web map and decision-support-tool components.
• World Water Online: Esri is partnering with U-Texas-Austin, Kisters, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), the US Geological Survey (USGS), the Consortium of Universities for Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUASHI), and others in this project seeking to bring together water information for the whole Earth, at all spatial scales (global, regional, local), linking both geospatial and temporal information, and linking data with modeling.
• and many more.

There are many natural science domains in which GIS is being used effectively to understand how the Earth works.

Other Initiatives
Open Source: Leveraging open source code and solutions with Esri technology is something that the scientific community is very much interested in. However, many in the science community are still surprised to hear that Esri produces free, open-source products such as Geoportal Server and the ArcGIS Editor for Open StreetMap or maintains a significant presence on GitHub. See also these excellent blog posts and summaries:

• GIS Panel Discussion at SciPy 2013
• What is Esri doing in the open source area?
• Going Open Source with Esri
• Esri and Open Source Software: More Please
• Open Source, Closed Source: Moving to the Middle

Big Data: Researchers today need to deal with an avalanche of data—from environmental sensor networks (both on land and at sea), social media feeds, LiDAR, and outputs from global- and regional-scale atmospheric circulation and general climate models and simulations. Because of this, “big data” has emerged as a major research theme for the academic community. In March, Esri developers released the GIS Tools for Hadoop Project on GitHub. The project contains an open source framework and API that enables big data developers to author custom spatial applications for Hadoop. The GIS Tools project also enables the ArcGIS platform to leverage big data on Hadoop using tools that combine custom Hadoop applications with the ArcGIS Geoprocessing environment. The project supports processing of simple vector data (points, lines, polygons) and basic analysis operations, e.g. relationship analysis on that data, running in a Hadoop distributed processing environment. See also this summary for the 2013 Esri User Conference.

Basemaps: Many in the scientific community are interested in and participate in our Community Maps Program. This is in the spirit of crowdsourcing of authoritative content from the community, that Esri then hosts free in the cloud and for which contributors retain ownership and are acknowledged. In terms of GIS analysis directly within the web browser, the geo-analytics web services that Esri offers for hydrologic science are the most advanced thus far.

Story Maps: Story maps allow scientists to make their data and analyses more accessible to their colleagues as well as to policy-makers and citizens (example). Think of the power of telling a 30-second elevator speech about your research to a funder or policy-maker as a story map! Templates and tutorials are available at storymaps.esri.com.

In 2012 Esri launched an Ocean GIS initiative across the entire Esri organization to enhance our capabilities to support GIS in both coastal and open ocean applications. As mentioned before in Esri Insider, Esri is particularly focused on a greater engagement with the ocean science community, as complex ocean science questions and data are increasingly used to inform the responsible use and governance of the oceans, as well as effective management and conservation. To support a better overall understanding of our oceans, Esri aims to improve and expand its products, tools, services, partnerships, and connections with the broader ocean community. The initiative as a whole is summarized in the 2nd edition of the e-book, The Ocean GIS Initiative: Esri’s Commitment to Understanding our Oceans, available here: esriurl.com/oceanebook.

Across the entire Esri organization we now have an Ocean GIS initiative, including a comprehensive strategic plan and an oceans/maritime resource center.  We’re also working with a growing list of terrific partners.

A major element of the Ocean GIS initiative is the release of ArcGIS for Maritime, which can help ocean scientists to document, manage, merge, and share bathymetric data much more efficiently (extra weblink). Another major effort that continues is the Esri Ocean Basemap which now includes over 2100 high-quality, authoritative bathymetric datasets as contributed by the global ocean community. And on November 7-8, 2012, Esri held a historic, one-time-only Oceans Summit. This was a high-level, strategic workshop for ocean scientists and resource managers, with an eye toward helping Esri to move forward in its approaches to software, associated data formats, tools, workflows, and computing platforms, where the oceans are concerned (and with important implications for hydrology, conservation biology, terrestrial ecology, land geology and geophysics, agricultural science, forestry, sustainability science, and of course, atmospheric, and climate science).

Day one of the Oceans Summit identified barriers to the use of GIS in ocean science and management, along with associated functional requirements and additional implications for atmospheric and climate science. Day two focused on removal of barriers, bridging of gaps via technical solutions in multidimensional and sensor data formats, and in tools, workflows, computing platforms, and issues of accuracy and uncertainty. The Summit has paved the way for the first open, all-comers Esri Ocean GIS Conference, scheduled for November 5-7, 2013, at our headquarters in Redlands, CA.  More information about the Esri Ocean GIS Conference will be made available soon.

In terms of ocean business drivers and business partnerships, our current focus is in hydrography, offshore energy, ports, defense, commercial fisheries, ocean science, and ocean regulatory/policy administration (national, regional, and local). Along these lines we are developing a strategy to provide a wide range of ocean content, leveraging the business needs/solutions process to define the specific content needs of these sectors. Esri ocean content is currently focused on foundational data (e.g., bathymetry/bathymetric elevation services, support for a polar basemap projection, charting services), as well as support of our public (e.g., NOAA) and private partners in making their data available as free or premium content in ArcGIS Online. Over time, we wish to move into geoenrichment and other analytic services.

Staying Connected
There are several ways to keep abreast of science developments at Esri:

• Download the full Esri and the Science Community presentation file.
• Follow several of the Esri Resource Center communities. These resource centers are organized by application domain (industry) or by technical approach. Each contains blogs, Twitter streams, discussion forums, videos, case studies, maps, apps, data, and documentation pre-selected to help users in that domain complete their work, without having to search through large volumes of content to find what best applies to their application domain. For example…
  • Bookmark the Esri Oceans Resource Center, particularly the blog post section, where there are updates posted all the time, including results of the 2012 Esri Oceans Summit and forthcoming information on the 2013 Esri Ocean GIS Conference.
  • Bookmark the Hydrology, Soils, Mapping, Community Analyst, Health, and 3D Resource Centers for the same reasons, all of which contain significant content for the science community (i.e., scientists within universities, research institutes, government agencies, NGOs).
• Bookmark the new ArcGIS for Professionals web site, which will have significant content for the science community, particularly with regard to geoprocessing and spatial analysis across many science domain.
• If you enjoy Twitter, follow Esri Chief Scientist Dawn Wright via @deepseadawn, where she makes science and ocean-related postings daily, or GIS and Science manager Matt Artz via @mattartz.
• Follow Matt Artz’s GIS and Science blog, to see the fascinating array of journal articles, books, and scholarly events where GIS technology is being used to advance scientific understanding.
• Attend the Esri International User Conference, where there are always high-quality paper sessions and map galleries focused on a wide array of scientific themes (including the annual GIScience Research session). In addition, there is a large Environment Showcase in the Exhibit Area (with several booths by research labs, agencies and initiatives), Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings, and science-related demo theaters (e.g., demo theaters by the wizards in our Applications Prototype Lab are always a treat for scientists). Consider the Esri International Developer Summit as well.
• Attend upcoming Esri specialist meetings with science themes (e.g., Geodesign Summit Europe in September, the Health GIS Conference in October, the Ocean GIS Conference in November, etc.). Information will be available via the bookmarks mentioned above, as well as at esri.com/events.
• Esri staffers also do great science themselves, and you are welcome to visit our new online Zotero library showcasing our publications.