This week the Virtual Earth Public Sector team is at the Microsoft CIO Summit at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, WA. I will be reporting on the event starting tomorrow but today I want to post a follow-up entry on last week's ESRI Federal User Conference in Washington, D.C.*

The event went extremely well for the Virtual Earth team. In the opening plenary session, ESRI CEO Jack Dangermond shared demos on ESRI GIS data integrated on the Virtual Earth mapping platform through the REST API that will be made available with the release of ArcGIS Server 9.3 this spring. Another demo highlighted the minimal amount of code necessary to build a Virtual Earth application (as I recall there were but 5 lines of code to the application demonstrated). As a result, the Virtual Earth booth was swarmed the minute the exhibit hall opened its doors and we saw non-stop traffic for the two day we were there. What pleases me is that in my second year of working these events, the overwhelming majority of delegates I meet are well aware of the Virtual Earth platform and the benefits of using it over competing mapping offerings for Public Sector applications.

Jack stopped by our booth and I had the pleasure of chatting with him briefly about the continued cooperation between ESRI and Microsoft.

In addition to the Social Distance Geoprocessing demo that I shared in my last bog entry (the demo can be found here) we were showing two other Virtual Earth demos that feature ArcGIS data integration. One of these is a drive-time analysis demo that allows you to specify a location and three different drive times to understand where assets would need to be to arrive within the times you have specified. Below is a screenshot that illustrates this demo. I have selected time values of 1, 2 and 3 minutes for a location in San Francisco.

The other is a plume modeling demo that allows you to understand the spread, in terms of time and extent, of the release of a toxic agent within a location you specify and according to variables such as wind direction and speed that you also set. I have chosen New York, with a wind speed of 12 MPH, a wind degree value of 45 and a spread time of 15 mins. I choose to map this in the Virtual Earth 3D mode to better visualize the plume reach. In a real world scenario, emergency response could use such a tool to conduct reverse 911 calls to alert citizens.

*

Exciting to see Virtual Earth being used not only for visualizing points on a map but as the front end for modeling and analysis.

ESRI ArcGIS data visualized through Virtual Earth ... everybody's happy.

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