Last week I attended the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) Annual User Conference in San Diego, California. This year’s conference on The Science of Where started out with a keynote address titled “GIS – Inspiring What’s Next” given by Jack Dangermond, the president of Esri. Here are five things I learned at this year’s user conference.

1. ArcMap: While Esri is transitioning their ArcGIS Desktop software focus from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro, ArcMap will continue to be supported for many years to come! This news at the plenary session was met with a round of applause, mine included. It’s important for us at NYU to embrace the future of GIS technology in ArcGIS Pro, but it’s equally important for us to be comfortable with some of the older GIS technology which is still widely used.
2. ArcGIS Hub: Billed as a new way to transform community engagement and collaboration, the ArcGIS Hub allows for two-way engagement with an ArcGIS Organization and the community it serves. WIth ArcGIS Hub you can create maps and data visualizations that can be easily shared or collaborated on with members in the community. Plus, this platform was worked on in part by an NYU alumni!
3. Living Atlas of the World: The ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World is a collection of geographic data and is constantly changing and growing, with more than 7,000 items currently. It is composed of Esri content, Esri partner content, and User content and contains data layers, pre-made maps, and applications that you can use to build up your own web maps and applications. Check the Living Atlas Blog (yes, this is a thing!) for more useful content and information.
4. Esri Vector Basemaps: So it’s not completely “new” news that Esri has offered users Vector Basemaps, but it’s worth mentioning how this change in basemap offerings can affect your maps. Vector basemaps use vector tiles that render on the client side rather than the Esri server side, unlike raster tiles. This change in rendering speeds up the process and makes the basemap image more clear. Additionally, you can create your own vector tile layers and customize map styles for use in your ArcGIS Online maps and apps. Vector Basemaps are currently on Version 2.
5. OpenStreetMap Vector Basemap: And last, but certainly not least, Esri has announced that this summer it will release a beta version of OpenStreetMap Vector Basemap. You may be familiar with the raster OpenStreetMap basemap that is currently available on ArcGIS Online, but the new vector basemap option will be updated with the latest OSM data and Esri will continue to update this vector basemap frequently. Best yet, in keeping with the open data model, the Esri OpenStreetMap Vector Basemap will be freely available to any user, so this basemap will not be limited to ArcGIS Organization members!

Here are five things we learned at PLOTCON:

1. Good Viz Works.
2. We can try to illustrate uncertainty in the data using animation.
3. We should use perceptually uniform colormaps.
4. When to use what visualization, with examples.
5. “Tip of the iceberg” of HIPAA violations: we know about a lot less than is actually happening.

(Links are to the actual talks, highly recommended to watch at 1.5 speed: Settings –> Speed)

The complete list of talks can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/user/plotlygraph

The slides will be available on Slideshare early next week.

—————————-

Bonus takeaways from PLOTCON:

Data Management:

• How to build a modern Data Catalog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFC3k1Y95f4
  • A data catalog provides context to help data scientists and other data consumers find a relevant dataset, determine if it can be trusted, understand what it means, and utilize it to make better products and better decisions.
• A way to keep data and code together with your publication via Authorea https://youtu.be/xJLE7Mruiqg?t=1608

GIS

• MAPD: incredibly fast interactive visualizations of billions of data points in real-time via GPUs: https://youtu.be/9z-nHmEm5JE?t=898
• Visualizing the racial divide: https://youtu.be/MmdPSgzfR5Y?t=1179
  • http://vallandingham.me/racial_divide/

R

• Excellent talk about wrangling data into shape for visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MfUCX_KpdE
• Amazing talk by Hadley Wickham (Chief Scientist at RStudio) on conceptualizing data manipulation for analysis and visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU0-NrUxRw4
• Animation within R with gganimate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y7Y1s4-VdA
• Mosaic Plots with ggmosaic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWr2JuILX74

HPC

• An interesting way to visualize performance of a program via a flame graph: https://youtu.be/0ODOZ4-U1VE?t=924 and skipping to python implementation: https://youtu.be/0ODOZ4-U1VE?t=1679

Other useful things:

• A demo of really nice features of Plotly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pjh1ThQoUs
• There’s way to put Tableau and Plotly together, although a little brute-force for now:
  • Example: http://public.tableau.com/profile/ben.jones#!/vizhome/TableauPlotlyPeaks/Globe
  • How to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyHrHxl4VbE