How is Esri supporting the vision of Spatial Data Infrastructure?

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SDI are evolving. Integrated geospatial infrastructure and modern SDI interconnect organizations across borders, jurisdictions, and sectors, to address our most significant social and environmental challenges, including natural and human-made disasters.

Geospatial collaboratives are alliances of organizations whose role is to lay the rules of engagement to cooperatively build integrated geospatial infrastructure, or spatial data infrastructure (SDI), and to engage with and grow the capacity of their communities. Modern SDI must take a holistic approach to governance, data and technology, engagement, and capacity building.

The ArcGIS platform provides the fundamental architecture to support SDI by being an open platform that enables secure, scalable, and frictionless data management, sharing, and use across a broad range of integrated applications. For example, collaborative partners use ArcGIS software and SaaS products to create, analyze, and manage authoritative data. They leverage shared resources and ArcGIS Solutions to build and maintain common core foundational data cooperatively. Coordinating bodies use ArcGIS tools to integrate and aggregate data from multiple heterogeneous sources in a distributed environment. Data and services from ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World supplement this work.

ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Hub provide the essential engagement and delivery solution to help make your SDI data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable). Geospatial collaboratives use Groups in Online and Hub to create shared data spaces where partners can share open data, maps, and applications. Partners document their data to maintain their investment, to automatically generate machine-readable metadata that powers search and discovery, and to facilitate data sharing and federation. A host of easy-to-use applications such as ArcGIS Dashboard, Survey123, and StoryMaps help amplify strategic initiatives and community engagement.

We seek to be a catalyst for effective geospatial collaboration. Our support of international open standards and open specification enables the use of open data with APIs and facilitates data interoperability and system interoperability. Beyond technology, we help you develop your geospatial strategy, learn new skills, share experience, and stay abreast of good practices. Ultimately, the combination of Esri's products, solutions, support and services, education, and training resources, alongside a robust global community of users, helps geospatial collaboratives build SDI, grow capacity, and have the tools you need to develop and execute your geospatial strategies.

In our increasingly interconnected world, interconnected data and location intelligence are crucial to seeing what others can't. Using shared resources, you and your partners can tackle challenges as varied as growing green economies, achieving sustainable development goals, improving equity and quality of life, and protecting people during public health emergencies like COVID-19.

For more answers to this and related questions, see the Esri UC 2020 Q&A