The ArcGIS Living Atlas
General, External sources ·Lecture given by: Dr. Josef Strobl, Paris Lodron University Salzburg
The Pros and Cons of ESRI and a Geospatial Ecosystem
I have to be honest and upfront with any readers and give some context for this reflection: I have had quite an up and down relationship with ESRI. When I was first getting into the geospatial field, I only used ESRI products as that is the only software my classes utilized. Frankly, at that time I did not even know there were alternatives to ESRI. There is no doubt that ESRI produced quality software and data and as such I was in love with their products and all the doors these products opened for me in terms of cool analyses. However, my feelings about ESRI began to change a little bit when I began working at a research lab that was focused on building open-sourced geospatial data repositories. This was the first time I was given an alternative to ESRI and I began to see the value of open source. However, it was not until I started my first job that I really began to see the limitations of ESRI. As part of my job I had to develop products for clients who did not have access to or could not pay for ESRI products. I began to see how much of the ESRI products and data were behind walls and inaccessible.
The reason I have gone on such a tangent as to my relationship with ESRI before reflecting on that talk is because while I have never doubted that ESRI produces incredible products in terms of their use, innovation, and quality, the high cost of access had caused me to turn away from ESRI. That is, until Dr. Strobl’s talk. Dr. Strobl’s demonstration of the different products and data available reminded me of all the possibilities ESRI provides. I was unaware of all the benefits of using ESRI from not having to download data to use it, access to AI tools, apps with automatically updated statistics, and being able to access data from third party vendors. Despite all this however, I still struggle with feeling like I can’t really manipulate, own, create, or share ESRI data or my resulting analyses because not everyone can afford to view the data or use the software. I like that the ArcGIS Living Atlas has so much data but I still cannot get over the fact that one cannot truly use the data in its entirety. Overall, while I have not completely changed my mind about ESRI, as a result of Dr. Strobl’s lecture I have softened my stance a little bit as to the usefulness and accessibility of ESRI. While everything might not be accessible, ESRI does provide a great hub for finding data and getting inspired. Most importantly though, as I was reminded, ESRI provides a great wealth of information available for free from their apps to their documentation to their blog.