PROCESSORS

ESRI announced today its participation in Map Middle East 2005, the region's first annual international conference and exhibition on geospatial information, technologies, and applications. The conference will be held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, April 23-25 and focuses on the issues pertaining to the growth of geospatial sciences in the Middle East, while providing a forum for geospatial cooperation within the region. ESRI, a gold sponsor of the conference, was joined in its booth by some of its Middle East distributors including GISTEC (United Arab Emirates), Khatib & Alami and Partners (Lebanon and the Sultanate of Oman), and Quality Standards Information Technology (QSIT) (Egypt and Libya). David Maguire, ESRI's Director of Products, was a keynote speaker in the Technology Trends plenary session. He discussed "Enterprise Geographic Information Servers: A New Information System Architecture." Comments Maguire, "Enterprise geographic information servers are a new type of GIS architecture that supports access to potentially thousands of distributed users from a centralized location. The industry standards-based approach to data management, application development, and data and processing access makes them ideal for providing GIS services to a wide range of distributed users. Similarly, the low cost of maintenance, high scalability, and excellent reliability means that organizations can create compelling business cases that demonstrate a good return on investment. "In the next few years, many new GIS user organizations will build systems based on this new server-centric architecture, and many existing user organizations will transition their systems to it. This new architecture will not make existing desktop and client/server architectures obsolete, but will complement them by providing an excellent platform for disseminating geographic information. Such systems will also extend the reach of GIS into new areas by spatially enabling existing and new enterprise lines of business."