GIS in Action 2025

Change is all around us – at home, at work, in our communities, across our nations, on our earth. We often talk about how GIS is changing the world, but the world is also changing GIS. How we use GIS, how we interact with GIS, and how GIS interacts with the world are all changing. Some of the change is technology-driven, but the biggest driver of change is you – the GIS user. The challenges you deal with and how you want or need to deal with them are changing GIS. In this talk, I share how GIS is changing in response to our world and the requirements of you – its users.

Can you confidently find your next conference session, the nearest exit, or a restroom? Come learn about options for navigating the venue. Sorry, no cheese… Have a map instead!

We’ll get familiar with the venue while evaluating strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs of this year’s conference maps and apps. Consider it a case study for technology selection, indoor reality capture, oriented imagery, and challenges in human wayfinding.

Bring your critical eye and thinking cap! Your questions and feedback will help improve next year’s experience.

Using ArcGIS Experience Builder, GIS-related web applications can be created by arranging and configuring components known as widgets. Core capabilities are provided by out-of-the-box widgets, while custom widgets can be added to allow for workflows and operations that may not otherwise be accommodated. In this session, the value of custom widgets will be discussed and the process of creating widgets will be explained. A range of audience interests will be served, from offering a general appreciation of the possibilities through to guidance for those who may wish to develop widgets themselves.

Many people are familiar with using Arcade in ArcGIS online for visual enhancement but it can also be used in Dashboards. In Dashboards Arcade can be used to create visual formatting and styling elements for a more user friendly and effective format. It can also be used for calculating fields and statistics from data in order to display better fitted information to your uses. This presentation will show examples of how this has been accomplished and show ways that it can be incorporated into many applications.

Well, it finally happened. ESRI has retired JavaScript 3.X API, and with it goes a whole suite of highly successful tools and applications. JavaScript 4.X is nothing new, but how does it stack up? Can you replace your Web Appbuilder apps? Should you replace them? This session is a look at the complexities of Experience Builder, and how to replicate common workflows from Web Appbuilder.

High-accuracy GNSS corrections are more accessible today than ever before. Accuracy levels from sub-meter to sub-foot to centimeter, with some being free as a public service. These corrections enable users to achieve down to centimeter horizontal and vertical accuracies in real-time, and be utilized on any iOS/Android/Windows mobile device.

GNSS correction providers in the Pacific Northwest include; ORGN, WSRN, Galileo HAS, Point One, Atlas, WAAS, and self-hosted RTK base stations. Understanding the capabilities of each service is important to achieve the desired level of accuracy and productivity. This presentation will begin with an overview of the GNSS landscape, then dive into the correction options available in the Pacific Northwest, summarizing the tradeoffs of each service.

Arcade is a portable, lightweight, and secure expression language used to create custom content in ArcGIS applications. In particular, it can replace the standard toolbox in ArcGIS Pro to perform on-the-fly calculations and keep field values up to date dynamically as feature geometries change. This presentation includes a high-level overview of Arcade’s capabilities and syntax and several examples of how to include it in a spatial analysis workflow, based on real-world examples from my GIS work at Oregon Metro.

Cloud GIS is transforming how organizations manage geospatial data, offering scalability, accessibility, and cost efficiency. But what drives this shift, and what lessons can we learn from those who’ve made the move? This session explores the benefits of Cloud GIS—real-time data access, automated updates, and seamless integrations—while diving into key cloud migration models: hosted (ArcGIS Online), non-hosted, multi-tenant, and hybrid. We’ll compare their pros and cons, including administration, security, and performance differences. Real-world case studies from government, utilities, and private enterprises will highlight successful migrations and how organizations overcame regulatory compliance and data governance challenges. Whether starting your cloud journey or optimizing an existing deployment, this session will provide technical insights to help you make informed decisions. Don’t just adapt—lead the change.

There are a number of tools built into ArcGIS Pro: geoprocessing, networking, and wide number of other analytical tools that give ArcGIS Pro the power to do so many things. Did you know that you can publish these tools to consume in a web app? GeoBlazor harnesses the power of the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JS to connect and bring the capabilities of these tools to your .NET web applications. We will discuss the capabilities and limitations of 'publishing' ArcGIS Pro tools and their usefulness in web applications. We will then demonstrate how GeoBlazor can connect to a published tool with minimal code to create a customized routing capability in a .NET web application.

In a world where AI has become as ubiquitous as towels are to interstellar hitchhikers, Christopher Moravec stands ready to guide you through the galaxy of possibilities and pitfalls.

"Don't Panic, It's Just AI: A Developer's Handbook" is your essential guide to navigating the often bewildering landscape of artificial intelligence. More controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy "Where AI Came From," "Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes," and "Who is this Siri Person Anyway?", this handbook is for any developer looking to harness AI without resorting to Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters to cope with the absurdity.

Through real-world examples, Christopher will show you how to use AI as a practical tool—from writing code with chatbots to generating sensible map names—while also revealing what AI excels at, where it falls short, and when to leave it out of your toolkit entirely.

Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting out, join us and, remember: Don't Panic, and always know where your towel is.