Enabling Jack Dangermond’s GIS Vision

I was intrigued by Jack Dangermond’s article in the Winter 2014/2015 edition of ArcNews entitled Geospatial Technology and the Future of the City. Page 12 of this article really caught my attention.To paraphrase Jack:

GIS has traditionally been focused on centralized geodatabases and implemented as departmental systems. Services oriented architectures have allowed data to be combined from multiple distributed databases. This has removed the need to integrate data into a single centralized system. This distributed system is better known as a federated architecture. This provides ways to integrate information from many sources across the enterprise and beyond. This type of data(base) integration requires common keys among and between distributed datasets. Location has become that common key. That can take the form of a x,y coordinate, address, placename, zip code or geographic area. GIS provides the tools to interrelate this data. This architecture is only possible if data is exposed as services through REST.

The diagram below shows what Jack describes, with this notion of dynamic spatial joins.

What Jack describes here represents in our view the future of GIS and location technology: the integration of data from many different sources, related through location, with geo-services used to visualize and analyse this data mash up. In the diagram above ArcGIS Online and Portal serve as the integration point. Wonderful new technologies which embody Jacks vision.

But suppose you don’t have ArcGIS Online and Portal? Maybe you have ArcGIS Server only, or no GIS server technology at all. How does this future vision serve you?

We’ve been looking into this conundrum. How to take advantage of all the benefits brought by ArcGIS Online and Portal, but not exclude those who do not have access to this technology. Our solution is remarkably simple. To use RESTful calls to integrate data at the application level. That means storing data in local databases. Databases which are on your device (PC, laptop, smartphone, tablet). Using advances in Web technology, it is now possible to store base maps, feature layers from ArcGIS Server or Online/Portal and enterprise data. As shown in the diagram below, we have built GeoIntegratorJS for ArcGIS which is a Javascript framework providing distributed data integration at the web application level.

The framework provides the ability for any ArcGIS web app to integrate distributed data. It also provides the ability to work while offline.

We share Jacks vision. With GeoIntegratorJS for ArcGIS we are working to help enable this vision.