Focus The City of Greeley, Colorado, makes information drawn from geospatial data in many departments instantly available through a responsive Web mapping application. This system gives a COP to Virginia Emergency Operations Center staff and allied agencies involved in emergency events. Information can be visualized, analyzed, and queried by staff members who are not GIS specialists. It is anticipated that data from VIPER will be shared with other state and local government partners using GeoRSS, .xml, and other widely accepted data formats. The Foundation Exists Esri has been evolving ArcGIS as a complete platform for geoenabling organizations. ArcGIS Desktop provides tools for authoring maps, managing data, building analytic models, and generating metadata. ArcGIS Server publishes that data to a variety of clients, from Web browsers and mobile devices to desktop GIS applications. This has enabled hundreds of government organizations to make data available to businesses, other government agencies, and individuals. With the creation of ArcGIS Online, Esri moved from being primarily a software company to a software-plus-services company. Each copy of ArcGIS includes free access to millions of dollars of content services—basemaps, imagery, demographic data, and other resources—that are immediately available from ArcGIS Online. Additional premium content is available from partners such as Microsoft, DigitalGlobe, and GeoEye on a subscription basis. ArcGIS Explorer is a GIS visualization tool for intuitively exploring, sharing, and presenting geographic information. It can combine locally created data with the continually updated basemaps and layers, shared maps, and tools from ArcGIS Online. Toward a Societal GIS As governments have been demonstrating for 40 years, applying geography improves the decision-making processes by addressing problems and evaluating proposed solutions in a holistic, comprehensive, systematic, analytic, and visual manner. With GIS, the analysis of problems can have greater depth, as many layers of data relating to the physical and cultural world can be considered together. GIS is a platform for optimizing systems, whether the system is a utility network, transportation system, or government. While the the use of GIS by the government, e-Government, GIS applications on the Web, and Web 2.0 are not new, the urgent need to find new ways to deal with old problems combined with increasing geospatial awareness and the desire on the part of government to pursue new technology are new. The ArcGIS platform—combined not only with the government's authoritative data but also its high-quality maps, visualizations, spatial analysis, models, and other rich applications made available as geoservices—would lead to the creation of government-to-citizen, government-to-business, government-to-education, and governmentto-government applications that would integrate all levels of government and support open access, collaboration, and transparency. GIS itself has brought." Existing services could be combined into new services. This would remove impediments between organizations currently using geospatial data and allow them to work in a loosely coupled environment that favors collaborating and encourages synergies. Examples Emerging Applications already developed for emergency response and military operations demonstrate the viability and value of loosely coupled environments for providing a common operational picture (COP). The Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM) uses Virginia Interoperability Picture for Emergency Response (VIPER) to protect the commonwealth's people and property. VIPER supplies a new level of situational awareness by combining data supplied by environmental sensors and gathered from VDEM's crisis management system and other external systems with traditional GIS layers that provide location context. www.esri.com ArcUser Fall 2009 11 r