Surveying, Mapping and GIS

This morning, I had a meeting with Richard Lawrence and Marten Hogeweg from ESRI to discuss their current efforts at implementing the ESRI Geospatial Portal Toolkit at EPA's National Computing Center. Man, am I relieved... previously every discussion revolved around the IBM WebSphere platform (ala GOS), but now that everyone's getting deeper into it and they have actively engaged ESRI in the effort, it appears that ESRI's made their implementation very platform-independent. The Portal platform of choice is Oracle - having an Oracle-based implementation will make it so much smoother and easier for the rest of us to work with.

The Oracle environment will help to integrate it with the single-sign-on Identity Management that our team is working on, as well as so many other portal and portlet-based things flying around in some of our current conceptual work... Best news I've heard in a while.

By the way, though they are both involved in ESRI's GPT implementations, Marten Hogeweg is no relation to Gerco Hoogeweg (I met Gerco at Research Triangle Park last fall) - Marten says Gerco's from a wealthier family, since they could afford to buy an extra vowel... I always loved the dutch language... as I grew up in Germany, we used to spend our summer vacations at the shore on the North Sea in Holland....