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4th Esri India User Conference 2013 saw a gathering ofthe like minded people of the GIS Community who hadcome together to share their experiences, best1

practices, applications, and success stories. The Esri IndiaUser Conference offered a wealth of information regardingtechnology and applications from Esri India, exhibitors andbusiness partners.Three days of technology extravaganza washeld from 10 -12 December 2013 at Kempinski AmbienceHotel, Delhi, India. The user conference was organized by EsriIndia (NIIT GIS Ltd.) and was supported by Digital Globe as a Bronze Sponsor, Geospatial Today, Directions Magazine India& Coordinates as Media Partners and Geospatial World as aPen Sponsor. The user conference witnessed participation ofmore than 800 delegates from 70+ organizations.

A day prior to the main user conference i.e. on 10thDecember, Esri India organized two pre-conference seminarsand a Developer’s Summit. The two pre-conference seminarswere on ArcGIS Online and GIS for Roads & Highways.

Preconference seminar on ArcGIS Online(AGOL) wasattended by a wide variety of audiences from different sectsof government organizations and academic community.Mr. Satish Sankaran from Esri Inc. along with the Esri Indiateam – Vatsal Dave, Krishna Rao TVB and Abhishek Sindalfocused on ArcGIS Platform, Portal of ArcGIS, LocationalAnalytics and possibilities of AGOL use by developers’community. Our partners from MapmyIndia and Indicustalked about the AGOL roadmap w.r.t to India specificcontent and its deployment.

Preconference Seminar on GIS for Roads & Highways wasorganized in collaboration with Indian Academy of Highway Engineers (under the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways,Govt of India). This seminar aimed at bringing the variousstakeholders together to showcase and address building ofroadmap for the use of GIS for State and Nationwide RoadsInformation and Management Systems. The seminar wasinaugurated by Sh. V L Patankar, Additional Director General,MoRTH, Govt of India. The keynote address was given byTerry Bills, Global Transportation Industry Director, Esri Inc.who focused on how GIS is useful for the Roads and Highwayssegment and how it is being used globally for managing thetransportation segment. The other India users who sharedtheir experiences of using GIS technology exclusive for thesaid segment were - Ravi Prasad, Director, IAHE,Dr. B K Durai,Sr. Principal Scientist & Head, PME Division, CRRI, Dr.PRajakumar, Assistant Divisional Engineer (IT), Tamil NaduHighways Department, Dr. Vivek Chitale, Senior TechnicalDirector & Head Geomatics & Digital Signature Division, NIC,Bhopal and Satyakam Sahu, General Manager (Traffic &Transportation), LEA Associates SA.

The second edition of Developers Summit brought togethersoftware developers both from the GIS and non GIScommunity to interact and get cognizant on the latestadvancements in GIS technology. The summit was addressedby Esri India team of developers led by Krishna Rao, SanjivDhupkar, Abhishek Sindal and Sanjeevi Kumar. TheDevelopers Summit majorly focused on the ArcGIS Platform

14th Esri India User Conference 2013: GIS – Transforming our World

and how ArcGIS Online will be an effective technology toolfor developers. This summit aspired to help softwaredevelopers become more effective at building crossmobile mapping applications and aimed at creating amechanism that is flexible enough to handle thebroad range of dimensions involved in softwaredevelopment. Sharad Arya from TCS andVishnu Chandra from NIC shared theirorganizational experience ofdevelopment

W i t hArcGIStechnology.

The twod a y E s r iI n d i a u s e rconference on1 1 - 1 2 t hDecember drew adiverse audience ofseveral hundred attendeesacross the country with afascinating mix of delegates andbureaucrats from the governmentagencies, defence, academia and the privatesector – a representative of users, future adopters and

act and discuss the new developments in Esri technology.Agendra also announced a strategic alliance between EsriIndia with MapmyIndia. As part of the agreement, both EsriIndia and MapmyIndia will collaborate to offer cutting edgeGIS solutions along with rich map data to enterprise andGovernment customers.

The plenary session was kicked off by Dean Angelides,Director, International Operations, Esri Inc., Who spoke aboutthe technological ability of GIS to manage numerouschallenges of real world such as climate change and disastermanagement. “GIS provides a visual picture of what all ishappening. It is changing the way we think and act”, he said.Emphasizing on the need of Web GIS, he said “Web GIS is aturning point as it gives the power to integrate all types ofdata. Dean’s keynote was further followed by a keynoteaddress by Rajesh Mathur, Vice Chairman, Esri India, whogave the Indian perspective of technology vision for India andhow GIS has been transforming our nation and how GIS

technology has evolved and used in various sectors inIndia. He said,“GIS a revolutionary step for a roadmap

for a smarter society”.

Two eminent Esri users in India sharedexperiences of how their organizations have

been using GIS for the benefit of thesociety. Dr. S N Das, Director,

Maharashtra Remote SensingApplication Centre addressed the

audience with the issues relatedto metadata standard, data

sharing and accessibility witht h e s l i d e s h o w o fMaharashtra Geo-portal asthe success story of GISimplementation. SunilPawar (IFS), DCF – Bidar,K a r n a t a k a F o r e s tDepartment highlightedthe success story of GIS

implementation by theK a r n a t a k a F o r e s t

D e p a r t m e n t l i k e e -G r e e n w a t c h , f o r e s tencroachment informationsystem, HULI, forest firemapper etc.

R a k e s h V e r m a , M D ,MapmyIndia spoke abouthow bus ine s se s andgovernment users can

better leverage the mapsprovided by MapmyIndia for the

Indian geography through AGOLplatform. Srinibas Patnaik, SeniorDirector, Digital Globe addressedthe user conference highlighting

the Imagery and Informationservices for ArcGIS users.

Mr. Arvind Thakur, CEO, NI ITTechnologies, addressing the gathering atthe user conference said,“GIS technology is

playing an important and significant rolein making us understand the various challenges beingfaced by the human race”. After addressing the gatheringMr. Arvind Thakur presented the Esri India Awards for the

drivers of GIS in their respective organizations across thenation. As we know that GIS is transformational and has beenchanging how we conceptualize and see the world. GIS istransforming geography, transforming health and publicsafety, transforming green buildings, transforming libraries,roadways, education, and national security. In line with thetrue potential of GIS, theme of this year’s conference was“GIS Transforming our World”.

The conference was opened by Agendra Kumar, President,Esri India who welcomed the august gathering of Esri users

and the eminent dignitaries. Sharing hisviews and user perspectives towards the

need for a User Conference as aplatform for all to

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year 2013 to our Esri users for outstanding applications ofgeospatial technology. The Esri India Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) award category had three recipients - Gujarat GasCompany Ltd (GGCL), Orange City Water Pvt. Ltd (OCW) andMaharashtra Remote Sensing Application Centre (MRSAC)respectively. GGCL used geospatial technology to createenterprise level Web GIS system and complete integration offramework that utilizes and processes network enabled GISand non GIS data in a customized manner over the web andwith other shared services of enterprise systems. OCW haspioneered the extensive use of GIS for utility segment creatinghydraulic model and maps to enhance their capabilities foraddressing issues in the water distribution network. MRSAChas promoted Esri technology to 25 state Governmentdepartments and academic institutions for use in variousapplications developing Web-geoportal & information /decision support systems, creating data warehouse andinformation dissemination framework. The ‘Making aDifference Award’ is given to people/institutions who arechanging the lives in the society through use of GIStechnology. This this award was presented to ICT Centre,Karnataka Forest Department for developing the Web basedGIS system ford a y - t o - d a ysurveillance andd e v e l o p m e n tactivities, query onthe maps on themove via a mobiled e v i c e o r abrowser interface,

integrating with various DecisionSupport Systems of the ForestDepartment for analysis on Geospatial interface for effectivevisualization and decision making viaemail and SMS system for automated responses.

The Esri Technology exposition showcased the latest featuresof ArcGIS technology and a view into future versions ofArcGIS. Krishna Rao TVB, Head Technical Support, Esri Indiaand his team, gave a complete insight into the latestdevelopments such as 3D GIS functionality, datainteroperabi l i ty , advanced geoprocess ing, datamanagement, Geo-event server for real-time tracking anddecision. The technology session also focused on the ArcGIS Image Server and its capability to cover up the imagingsolutions along with the integration of ENVI Image Processingcapabilities along with new version of ENVI 5.1. The sessionsalso covered technology areas such as ArcGIS Online, Portalfor ArcGIS and Locational Analytics.

This year Esri India also organized aGIS Quiz for our esteemedusers. Quiz had four participating organizations- Reliance Jio Infocomm, TCS, Teri University and BSES. The winner of theGIS Quiz was TCS (Participants – Sharad Arya, Sumit, RavindraSingh) and First Runners Up was TERI University (DeepikaMann, Bakul Budhiraja, Florencia Matina Tuladhar)

Esri India always believed in the vision of moving ahead thegeospatial technology for the development of the mankind.Keeping this vision alive, we had MapmyIndia, NIIT University,NATMO, NeSTIT, ADCC, HP, Reprographics, Survey of India,Registrar General of India and IAHE showcasing the cuttingedge development in the geospatial domain. Exhibitors hadan opportunity to display their hardware, software, datasets,data services, application products and GIS information to theuser community.

The second day of the conference started with greatexcitement and interactive participation by various usersshared their innovative ideas and research work with the GISfraternity. The most highlighted one was the interactive halfday seminar on Standards And Interoperability where DeanAngelides, Satish Sankaran and Krishna Rao TVB discussed on

how to leverage Standards and Interoperability tocreate pragmatic Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) andalso discussed about the OGC - Esri compliance

A total of 40 papers and 21 posters presentation weremade by our esteemed GIS users. A series of success

stories fromacross sectorssuch as newt e c h n o l o g ydevelopments,h e a l t h c a r e ,forestry andenvironment,infrastructure,d i s a s t e rmanagementw e r ep r e s e n t e ddur ing userpresentations.

As always, the User Conferencewas a hotbed of new ideas withconversations about trends thatare occurring in the GIS world. Thepanel discussion was conducted ons e c o n d d a y o n “ G I S –Transforming our World”.Thepanelists were, Vandana Sharma,DDG (RS & GIS), NIC, Milind

Deshpande, Sr. Vice President, Reliance Jio Infocomm,Maneesh Prasad, Editor in Chief, Directions Magazine India,Terry Bills, Global Transportation Industry Director, Esri Inc.and Rajesh Mathur, Vice Chairman, Esri India who was themoderator of the panel discussion. The forum discussed thevarious aspects geographical domains that have enabled GIStools to share geographic information, interact with stakeholders for future development of software technology andsolutions.

The conference ended with an awards ceremony for the UserPresentations and an invitation to the delegates for the User Conference scheduled for December 2014. Awards werepresented under the Best Paper, Best Student Paper and BestPoster categories