Minister Gormley addresses GIS Ireland

2007-10-24

 From Left to Right
Eamonn Doyle, President of IRLOGI (Principal Consultant, ESRI Ireland)
John Gormley, T.D, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government
Bruce McCormack, Vice President of IRLOGI, (Department of Environment, Heritage & Local Government).

The GIS Ireland 2007 Conference and Exhibition was held on Wednesday 17th October 2007 and was attended by over 250 delegates drawn from Local Authorities, Government Departments, Utilities and Consulting Engineers and Planners. That this was one of the best attended GIS Ireland Conferences was testament to the strength of the GIS industry in Ireland.

The Conference was opened by the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, John Gormley TD. In his address the Minister praised the work of the GIS community in Ireland and stressed how much of Government decision making depended on Geographic Information.  The Minister also highlighted the excellent work his own Department was doing in relation to making their spatial data available via the new websites -which have been delivered by ESRI Ireland e.g. National Parks & Wildlife www.npws.ie and National Monuments www.archaeology.ie

Minister Gormley spoke on behalf of his colleague the Minister of Communications, Energy & Natural Resources who used the conference as a platform to announce that forthwith all spatial data from the DCENR was being made available free of charge via the Spatial Data Pages developed by ESRI Ireland and powered by ArcGIS.

Both of these initiatives were positioned as largely meeting the obligations of these Departments under the INSPIRE Directive. In fact many of the speakers were now seeking to position themselves relative to the INSPIRE Directive, it was gratifying to see how advanced the ESRI Ireland clients were in this regard many of whom had metadata, interactive spatial web servers and data delivery facilities. The Minister will meet with IRLOGI in January to discuss the implications of INSPIRE in more detail.

The keynote addresses at the Conference were given by Microsoft and Google. Johanes Kebeck, Microsoft made a great start with a fantastic presentation of their Virtual Earth product. The sort of data that they are now beginning to make available goes way beyond expectations with “birds-eye” and 3D views of many cities. They are talking petabytes of information and billions of dollars of investment.

Mr. Kebeck also highlighted the work they were doing with ESRI Inc around integrating the ArcGIS 9.3 release with the spatially enabled SQL Server product and with Virtual Earth via the REST API for ArcGIS Server.

Google took a more reflective and philosophical approach to their presentation. Ed Parsons took the opportunity to speak about how the GI industry could position itself in the light of the amazing developments by Google and Microsoft – his thoughts echoing the sentiments of Jack Dangermond, CEO of ESRI Inc, who is advocating that the GIS Professional "embrace and extend" these new technologies.