Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI’s software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI’s influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history of GIS and online mapping.
Jack will be speaking at Where 2.0 on May 20th in San Jose. You can use whr09rdr for 20% off at registration.
Brady Forrest: What do you think will be coming in the next couple of years that will make the geoweb a reality?
Jack Dangermond: I think the geoweb is a reality. It’s just a matter of how you define it I guess. There’s just millions of pieces of content now available on the web for either FTP download and use in GIS or other analytic tools or as services that people are accessing by way of open systems. So I’d say maybe more analytic services that are available on the web or developers who take the foundations of technology as they exist today and build applications to them. But there’s got to be motivation. There has to be a commercial incentive for people like young developers to build applications on the web with web services. And maybe there has to be a marketplace created. I’m speculating here. I don’t have a clear answer for you on that.
Brady Forrest: You guys did have a marketplace for a little while, did you not?
Jack Dangermond: We do. We started with something called ArcWeb which was a little bit successful. It focused primarily on content and then developed an environment for people to build apps out of. But considering the cost of that compared to the kind of income that was coming in from it, it was not sustainable. Google and Microsoft’s websites in some way displaced that because much of the content that was there was free and it was much bigger. From what I’ve been told, somewhere between $75 and $100 million a year is spent on that content basemap to maintain it and serve it. That’s not sustainable if we’re talking about small developers. So we sort of shut ArcWeb down effectively. I mean we still have a few users that are using it, but it’s not something that sustains itself. If you have search and advertising revenue coming in, then you can afford to — as Google and Microsoft do, you can then afford to subsidize a lot of that content. But you can’t do it as an independent. So our second stage is —
Brady Forrest: I find that really interesting that you think the consumer GIS market is actually richer in some ways — on the web is richer than say the enterprise.
Jack Dangermond: Our second stage in the development of that is something called ArcGIS Online which is part of our actual software subscription, which has arguably the same kind of content and rich content that the consumer sites has as basemaps. And will I think iterate into a foundation for sharing a lot of the higher-end data content.
Brady Forrest: So when it comes to creating the open geoweb, what place do you think open formats have versus proprietary formats?
Jack Dangermond: Why don’t you further elaborate on what you’re getting at?
Brady Forrest: So KML has exploded in usage since it was not owned by Google anymore and became an open format and a lot more companies have adopted it. Sometimes GIS data gets locked up in different formats. It’s not readable by multiple platforms.
Jack Dangermond: So that’s a statement; isn’t it? It’s not a question.
Brady Forrest: I guess so. Yeah.
Jack Dangermond: Yeah.
Brady Forrest: What role do you think that has in creating the geoweb?
Jack Dangermond: I think KML is a very important standard. The other OGC standards are very important standards. As a vendor, we support all the standards and attempt to be open and standards-based with respect to our interfaces on the web.
Brady Forrest: Okay. And then just one final question. What do you picture is the future of interaction with spatial data beyond maps?
Jack Dangermond: Maps are a powerful to communicate spatial data and tell stories. So for me, maps are a kind of communication medium for storytelling. People want to tell stories; they use a map to be able to do it. And so for me, a lot of what I’ve seen in the consumer mapping world has been storytelling. I want to tell a story on conservation. I want to tell a story on where something is happen, where something’s cool, where there’s a great site for this or that. And I publish that and make it available for other people to see it. So beyond that, people are interested in analytics. They’re interested in saying, “Where should I live?” And do it beyond simply visualization. They want to be able to use a model like when I mentioned before Dr. Maidment good work. If I could overlay a lot of different layers in a model format and then manipulate it and say, “Here’s a very cool place to live,” that’s spatial analysis. That’s a model.
So I think even 45 years ago when we were first inventing computer mapping at Harvard, our first attempts were to make beautiful maps. They weren’t very beautiful; they were pretty crude. But very quickly thereafter, we moved from mapping into analytics, spatial decision-making to support land use planning and business planning of various sorts. So I think if you’re asking me where will the web and the geospatial world move, it will be from simple map displays to analytics on the web. It’ll move from simply a basemap with overlays on it to the notion of multiple distributed services that do spatial analysis, but combine various kinds of spatial data together and serve it back out as visualization communications.
Brady Forrest: Okay. Well, thank you very much, Jack.
Jack Dangermond: You’re welcome. Thank you, Brady.
This was the third portion of a three-part interview with Jack. The first was on Web Mapping and the second part was on Sharing Government GIS Data.