2006 Map Gallery
It is my pleasure to introduce you to ESRI Canada's seventh Map Gallery calendar. The 2006 calendar contains a small selection of the many superb maps created by ESRI users across Canada. I want to thank everyone who submitted an entry; the numerous, high quality entries made the decision a difficult one for the selection committee. Geography continues to grow in importance as a framework for helping manage our world. Geographic information systems (GIS) let us manage the huge and rapidly growing quantities of data that describe our world, query and analyze that data, and make a wide variety of maps that communicate geographic knowledge to others. GIS is being used to build operational systems for better management of our infrastructure, controlling urban growth, mitigating natural disasters, reducing poverty and crime, maintaining biodiversity, sustaining economic growth, finding new sources of energy, and securing our safety. GIS is also being used to provide new services to the public including web portals for driving directions, spatially searching electronic yellow pages, tracking children with global positioning systems (GPS) phones, vehicle navigation and visualizing our world. ArcGIS continues to grow as a platform for managing geographic information and making superb maps. New capabilities for managing historical data in an archive help better describe geography, both past and present. Improvements to the geoprocessing framework help model complex geographic processes and create maps showing changes to the landscape over time. New cartographic capabilities allow multiple representations of features in the same geodatabase, making it possible to create maps at different scales and for different purposes without modifying the original features. Server based GIS continue to evolve providing access to advanced capabilities to a much wider user community. A new Image Server will be released in 2006 providing a way to manage and share the large image libraries coming from satellites and digital aerial cameras. The Internet continues to grow as an important medium, not only for sharing data and publishing maps, but also for integrating applications both inside and outside organizations. In 2006, ESRI Canada will continue to expand the Geography Network Canada portal http://www.geographynetwork.ca/, adding free basemap data for Manitoba to the Ontario Base Mapping and Geobase, the national basemap. ESRI will be publishing an ArcGlobe web service with terabytes of free data, accessible to all ArcGIS users and also to the public through a free, downloadable viewer. As ESRI Canada begins its third decade, my colleagues and I are more committed than ever to serving you by better understanding your needs and helping you understand our products and services. This coming year we will be hosting 16 user group meetings, 30 special interest group meetings, attending many conferences, and holding dozens of seminars across the country. GeoConnections is holding a series of workshops across Canada in 2006 to better understand the needs of decision makers who use Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) as a source of geographic knowledge. I look forward to personally meeting many of you at these events. On behalf of all of us at ESRI Canada, I want to thank you for your support and look forward to serving you for many years to come. From our families to yours, Happy Holidays and best wishes for 2006. Yours truly, Alex Miller President ESRI Canada Limited |
