ESRI wants your Imagery

(To be consistent with my previous post, I haven't heard about this in any of the blogs from the Plenary)

James noted that ESRI now has a ArcGIS Online Content Sharing Program. Basically you give ESRI your high-quality imagery, and they might add it to ArcGIS Online, and thus be easily available via ArcGIS Explorer, ArcMap, and ArcReader.

Why would you do this? To get your imagery as easily accessible as possible. I'm sure many local GIS people have had to explain more than once why their latest aerial photography is not in Google Earth.

Its all not that much different than having a publicly accessible ArcIMS Image Service (which can be viewed via ArcMap and ArcReader). The main difference is that ESRI is hosting the data rather than you. Which, in theory, would be cheaper since you don't have to pay for the hardware, bandwidth or even ArcIMS just to host high-resolution imagery.

Unfortunately, ESRI seems to want only new imagery (less than one year old preferred). I think it would be even more useful to have historical imagery included. I also suspect that many more local governments would be willing to submit their historical imagery, at least at first.

Is state agency or local government going to sign up? Why or why not?

The UC

Many fellow EWUGers at the User Conference. Those of us who are not, are probably getting the latest news via the bloggers who are there. I'll try not to repost any of the major announcements unless there is a specific Wisconsin connection.

Otherwise, feel free to comment about the User Conference.