00:01I'd like to also acknowledge briefly the United Nations.

00:06The UN has been a remarkable user for decades in peacekeeping, economic development...

00:14...contributions in conservation, and, well, many things.

00:22In the last year and a half, the Cartographic Unit and the Statistical Unit have made huge contributions...

00:29...to almost every country in the world...

00:31...bringing standards, bringing templates for behavior, and working to build a foundation for GIS users.

00:39I'd like you to just join me in acknowledging and thanking all of their good work.

00:52The vision of this year's conference, the theme of this year's conference, is GIS, Opening the World to Everyone.

01:02Opening our world to everyone.

01:05And this probably conjures many ideas in each of us. What does he mean?

01:09What are they talking about, opening our world to everyone?

01:13Geography has been about...

01:17Geography, the science that our field is built on, has been about traditionally exploring and describing our world.

01:24Early explorers went to the Poles; and they went to the tops of mountains; and the bottoms of the oceans...

01:30...like we heard from Sylvia Earl some years ago.

01:34And exploring other kinds of relationships, like Jane Goodall and Cynthia Moss, previous speakers here.

01:40Finding relationships and understanding how the world works and then sharing it with everyone else.

01:47About 50 years ago, a new kind of geography was birthed. I like to call it computational geography.

01:55This involved people exploring, using computers and mapping and geographic science, relationships, developing a new field.

02:09They were driven by, in some cases, curiosity, like Waldo Tobler and David Simonett and John Borchert...

02:17...and sometimes driven by applications and application vision, like Roger Tomlinson and Carl Steinitz and Duane Marble.

02:28This birthed, this foundation of computational geography birthed GIS.

02:36And this has become something that has advanced geography itself.

02:41It's implemented systematic measurements and quantifications and analysis of modeling.

02:47All the underpinnings of everything that supports your work today.

02:52And it's also opened up our world to new forms of exploration, not simply mountaintops, but understanding our world in different ways.

03:03There's still much of our world that remains unexplored in this dimension and also many geographic problems to solve...

03:13...problems about human population and understanding environmental change, the role of biodiversity...

03:20...global climate change and globalization, and shifts in urbanization and the massive amounts of people moving to cities...

03:26...and then making cities more livable, and ending poverty and hunger and sustainable development like we saw in Abu Dhabi...

03:34...and clean energy and ecosystem conservation and ecosystem restoration...

03:39...and then the dimension of the relationship between our environment and human health.

03:44We clearly need...we still have a long ways to go.

03:50We clearly need better understanding and we need the participation by everyone else, not just some GIS professionals...

03:59...but everyone needs to be connected.

04:02GIS is already organizing our geographic information, our knowledge, and clearly, now we must extend...

04:11...we must share our systems to support everybody else, integrating geography, what we know, into everything we do.

04:19We know that that is, we know that that is clearly a solution.

04:24Your work demonstrates the fact that building communities and working across disciplines...

04:30...and across geographies and organization is one of the answers for our future.

04:36Is this, is this vision possible, that we could move from all that we've been doing over the last four decades...

04:44...to developing a global vision of GIS?

04:51Leveraging our collective geospatial investments and knowledge, making maps and full GIS available to everyone?

05:05Well, there's many forces that are converging right now.

05:11Computing, for example, continues to evolve, following Moore's Law.

05:15Faster machines, networks, the Internet, and now this explosion of mobile devices...

05:20...which are like Cray computers walking around in our hands.

05:25Also, measurement is increasing, more real-time measurement, more sensor networks...

05:32...and now we have another dimension of data, crowd sourcing from people and citizens coming in to GISs.

05:40GIS software is evolving along; more sophisticated, dealing with temporal, dealing with full 3D, and becoming much more usable.

05:50And at the same time, it's coevolving with geographic science...

05:55...understanding of relationships and patterns and processes, extending into networks.

06:00And about now, our governments are beginning to open up.

06:06Open data policies are providing underpinnings for this information to come together...

06:11...creating a kind of collective geographic understanding, opening our world to everyone.

06:21GIS professionals, you particularly, are increasingly making it available.

06:27You're sharing your data, you're publishing apps, you're publishing services, and you're developing more collaborative approaches...

06:35...serving citizens with your information, connecting to other aspects of your organizations...

06:42...executives are beginning to connect on in, as we'll see a lot this morning...

06:47...using maps as a language to engage everyone about geography.

06:54All of these efforts are resulting in a kind of Web-based geospatial platform.

07:00The Internet as a platform is emerging, a distributed network of services and data, which are easily discoverable and accessible and open...

07:11...providing a platform for a new generation of applications to emerge.

07:16Applications which are citizen reporting, crowd sourcing in a meaningful way.

07:22Citizen science through things like iPhones and Android phones, seeing geography by everyone.

07:30Open government initiatives, the crisis management in the Gulf.

07:33All of these are indicative of the ability to enable many new kinds of applications, opening GIS for everyone.

07:41And a new generation of these apps is emerging, and a new generation of developers is coming along, leveraging this.