Esri UC 2023

San Diego, California - This year's Esri User Conference (UC) was held July 10-14 in San Diego and was once again a huge success. Themed "GIS CREATING THE WORLD WE ALL WANT TO SEE," the world's largest geographic information systems (GIS) and location intelligence event gathered more than 16,000 enthusiastic on-site attendees and nearly as many digital participants.

Esri Inc founder and president Jack Dangermond opened the plenary session with an impressive presentation. He emphasized that a sustainable future for our planet is possible if we all work together. Now is the time to act. In this context, Dangermond highlighted the great importance of the work of the GIS experts present, who are helping to solve problems, build common understanding and shape the world we all want. "Sustainability starts with geography," Dangermond said.

Overall, the UC offered attendees a wide-ranging technical program with 241 technical workshops, 55 special interest group sessions, 204 presentations in the demo theater, and 205 user presentations. This makes the UC the largest GIS conference in the world with a maximum broad range of topics that impressively represents the diverse applications of geoinformation technology.

As an Esri Platinum Partner, con terra GmbH was once again an integral part of the UC this year. Both as an exhibitor at the expo, bronze sponsor of the event and with expert presentations, the GeoIT company from Münster presented its expertise - including in the areas of modern spatial data infrastructures, OpenData provision and efficient spatial data management. At the highly frequented booth, visitors took the opportunity to learn more about security.manager and to exchange ideas with the con terra experts. The security.manager extends Esri's technology with additional access control functions and makes data exchange easier, more efficient and more secure. 
The presentations by long-standing con terra customers such as Vodafone, TenneT and the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation with their practical examples also met with great interest among the international trade audience.

Fig. 1: The con terra team with Esri founder and president Jack Dangermond (center).

A central theme of the conference was the use of digital twins, i.e. digital images of the real world. Particularly impressive were the many innovations in 3D, ArcGIS Reality, Indoors, and GeoBIM that add value to the creation and use of digital twins. These models and results support proper decision making and capture the core message of the conference: GIS is creating the world we all want to see!

The Esri User Conference 2023 was again a great success and an important step towards a better and sustainable future. Esri and its global partners will continue to work together towards this goal.

With the insights and impressions gained, the con terra team now returns and looks forward to sharing its knowledge with customers and prospects. Opportunities to do so will be provided by the upcoming "Peak of Data Integration" events in Bonn in September, as well as the German "Esri Conference" also taking place in Bonn or the "Esri European Developer Summit" in Berlin, both of which will be held in November.