Toronto, ON - February 3, 2009 - As part of an ongoing commitment to actively promote GIS in education, ESRI Canada has collaborated with the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) to enhance one of their most renowned attractions - the Teck Suite of Galleries: Earth's Treasures. ESRI Canada donated imagery and created sophisticated animation to enhance videos appearing in both the Vale Inco Limited Gallery of Minerals and the Nature of Diamonds exhibition. ESRI Canada also contributed to the permanent large-screen interactive display that is showcased in the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame.

Vale Inco Limited Gallery of Minerals features a continuously running video that explores numerous minerals and precious gems along with their associated mining locations around the world. ESRI Canada leveraged the ArcGIS 3D Analyst extension to enhance the video by creating an animated rotating globe that zooms into various mining sites in Afghanistan, Burma, Australia, South Africa and Brazil among many others.

High resolution imagery was then incorporated into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame's interactive display to bring the Canadian landscape to life. The video presents a virtual tour of mining in Canada and provides a touch-screen display allowing museum visitors to access biographies and short documentaries about mineral resources.

"ESRI Canada's contribution to our Canadian Mining Hall of Fame was invaluable", said Jason French, Project Manager for the ROM. "We chose to work with ESRI Canada due to the flexibility of their software that allowed us to create custom high resolution terrain images of geographical locations within Canada."

ESRI Canada also incorporated animation and satellite imagery into the museum's 'Crystal Clear: Diamonds from Canada's North' video that zooms into Canadian diamond mines. The video is part of the world traveling Nature of Diamonds exhibition that is considered the ROM's feature attraction of the year. The exhibition runs until March 22 and will be traveling next to the Science Museum in Houston, Texas.

The project has been so successful that talks are currently underway to prepare similar videos for other ROM exhibits, and these videos will be posted on the ROM website for viewing. For more information, please visit http://www.rom.on.ca/.

About the Royal Ontario Museum

The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is an internationally renowned museum and a popular public attraction in downtown Toronto, Canada. First opened to the public in 1914, the ROM has grown to become Canada's largest museum of world cultures and natural history, with some six million objects in its collections today. The ROM presents engaging galleries of art, archaeology and natural science from around the world. In addition to collections, gallery and exhibition development, the Museum's curators, together with their associates and students, conduct important scientific and academic research around the world in partnership with prominent institutions and governments, writing and publishing more than 80 papers and articles each year. The Royal Ontario Museum is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

About ESRI Canada

Established in 1984, ESRI Canada is a Canadian owned company specializing in geographic information systems (GIS) solutions. ESRI Canada distributes the world's leading GIS software including solutions from ESRI Inc., Miner and Miner, I.S.M. International Systemap Corp. and Azteca. In order to provide organizations with complete industry-specific solutions ESRI Canada has established an extensive business partner program that includes more than 130 Canadian organizations. ESRI Canada also provides professional services including consulting, training, technical support, and enterprise GIS implementation. ESRI Canada is a leader in providing world-class enterprise GIS solutions for many industries including public works, land management, utilities, defence, public safety, business demographics, education, natural resources and transportation. ESRI Canada has sixteen regional offices across the country, with headquarters in Toronto, Ontario. For more information, please visit http://www.esricanada.com/ or call 1-800-447-9778.


Contact:

Amanda Graff
Marketing and Communications Specialist
ESRI Canada
Tel.: 416-441-6035 Ext 6308
E-mail: Email Contact
Web.: http://www.esricanada.com/