To ESRI’s Thompson, GIS Mapping Innovations Are The ‘Canvas On Which We Draw the Story of Analysis’

customer profiling. “We’re now in our third major version of that software,” Thompson says. “We’ve been able to keep evolving the software in the cloud…It’s software you buy as a service and tailor to a problem, so customers can configure and customize it.”

Apart from this increasing capability to provide detailed market data and customer profiles for local regions, Thompson identifies a couple of other trends of increasing innovation.

One trend in GIS innovation stems from creating GIS mapping “masks,” or layers of mapped information, that can be easily substituted. As a result, Thompson said, “you can change the underlying data set on your iPhone application” from a map of gas stations in downtown San Diego to a map of restaurants, or a map of surfboard shops in the same area.

Another involves the convergence of GIS mapping technologies with software analytics. “There is a fundamental place for combining these highly accurate systems with enormous data mining capabilities,” Thompson said. “I consider that to be the canvas on which we draw the story of analysis.”

So, for example, a San Diego-based GIS company called The Omega Group has adapted ESRI mapping technology to allow police and fire agencies throughout San Diego County to combine their incident reports. “It allows all members of police and fire agencies to take advantage of visualization, reporting, and analysis,” says Milan Mueller, The Omega Group’s president. As a result, Mueller said police investigators can see crime patterns that might not be visible otherwise, such as clusters of burglaries that are occurring in different cities. Using more sophisticated software analytics, ESRI’s Thompson says it’s possible to answer more difficult questions, such as, “why is this Federal Express package delivery running late?”

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.