Looking forward

ESRI has made major investments in the development and implementation of open GIS standards, not only to serve our own customers but also to promote sharing geographic data across all GIS platforms. We believe our continuing investments in open technologies and participation in organizations will result in increasingly open and interoperable GIS solutions.

The following initiatives are some of the areas in which ESRI is concentrating its efforts with regard to standards and interoperability. When available, these technologies will be downloadable from the ESRI Interoperability Technology Download Center.

Enhancements to the OGC Web Map Service Connector for ArcIMS

ESRI is enhancing the WMS connector for ArcIMS to support a Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD). The Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC), SLD Web Map Server component responds to requests for a Web map service to produce maps of georeferenced data.

The SLD component allows features from a Web feature service to be retrieved and allows a user to set explicit styling information in order to render a map. Users will also be given the capability to dynamically request features that are rendered on top of existing map layers.

The SLD component of the OGC Web Map Service Connector for ArcIMS will be available in the spring of 2003.

Enhancements to the OGC Web Feature Service Connector for ArcIMS

The OGC Web Feature Service connector for ArcIMS allows a client to retrieve spatial data encoded in Geography Markup Language from multiple Web feature services. The OGC specification defines two types of Web feature services, basic and transactional. A basic WFS, currently implemented as the OGC Web Feature Service, implements the GetCapabilities, DescribeFeatureType, and GetFeature operations. A transactional Web feature service supports all the operations of a basic Web feature service and, in addition, implements the transaction operation and, optionally, the LockFeature operation.

The OGC Web Feature Service Transactional component will be available in the spring of 2003.

ArcGIS Interoperability Toolkit

ESRI will provide add-ons to the ArcGIS Desktop products (ArcView, ArcEditor, ArcInfo) that allow Web mapping client applications to access multiple OGC WMS, OGC WFS, and Registry services. The client applications include ArcGIS applications such as ArcMap and ArcCatalog (for ArcView, ArcEditor, and ArcInfo), JavaServer Pages-based HTML applications, and Java-based applet or desktop clients.

The ArcGIS Interoperability Toolkit will be available in the spring of 2003.