ESRI User Conference - San Diego, California

"Communicating our World" was the message Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI, presented to the opening plenary. "Our world needs better understanding, and GIS is the medium that helps us communicate and understand our world."

One impressive innovation ESRI techs demoed was the GDP History Viewer working with the animation and video capabilities of ArcGIS 9.2. A real world application showed historical changes in statistics of children afflicted by asthma. Another dataset showed historical data about air quality in the areas where these children reside, and yet another dataset showed addresses of afflicted children in proximity to freeways. Bringing the datasets together in GIS to produce an animated historical map that showed changes in asthma cases, air quality, and freeway exhaust made health correlations obvious.

(Copy from ESRI UC website)