Later this year we will be updating the Local Government Basemaps solution and leverage new capabilities in ArcGIS Pro, such as tasks and the ability to publish vector basemaps. Before we begin updating this solution and we want your feedback! What Local Government Basemap have you published? (feel free to share) What is your favorite basemap? Are their specific design changes you would like us to make to an existing basemap?
I build my own base maps. I am not a fan of the web mercator auxiliary sphere. We prefer our local projection. When I do use an ESRI base map, I tend to use the aerials, as those are the most useful for us, but tend to lack the resolution we need for most our projects.
We have also created our own bassemap, but it is based on the original general pupose local basemap. We do get push back on this map as it does not have a high colour contrast, which is required as we work towards WCAG compliance. Clients tend to want to use open street map because of this.
On another note, I just downloaded all the basemaps at the link above but the GeneralPurpose.mxd has been saved at a version higher than 10.3.1 so I am unable to open it. Would it be possible to lower the version on that .mxd?
Thanks,
Alison
I have used the General Purpose and Imagery Reference Overlay maps and have found them helpful as a starting point for a lot of maps and applications we've created. We did have to make some modifications though to work with our data. For these details, some sort of documentation would have been nice.
These base maps have been a great way to provide visual consistency between our printed and digital products and have decreased the amount of time it takes for us to make custom maps. However, I have had some sort of operational issues with them. For example, both the general purpose and imagery reference basemaps include parcels and roads. For our particular organization, those data layers change on a daily basis. That would force us to recreate caches daily in order to keep our web applications up to date with actual feature geometry. That method just isn't sustainable or recommended. Also, the suggestion to use "Best" for Anti-Aliasing when publishing a basemap is in direct opposition to what your Server team recommends, especially if the cache needs to be rebuilt (Accelerating map cache creation—Documentation (10.3 and 10.3.1) | ArcGIS for Server). It might be a good idea to run a full implementation of one of these base maps from download to web application and involve members of each of the involved teams in the implementation to replicate their use by local governments.
We published and use the General Purpose and Imagery Reference Overlay. We have really like the color schemes of those basemaps.
The biggest issues with the General Purpose was the readability of the labels, the lack of repeating road names, and difficultly seeing where the city limits end. The labels are a little difficult to read in vector format and they become even more difficult to read once the basemap is rasterized. The lack of repeating road labels made you pan around the map at certain scales to find the name of a road that you were looking at. The transition from "in the city" to "out of the city" is hard to see on some monitors. It would be nice to add a dashed line to clarify the point of transition.
The main things that we changed for the Imagery Reference Overlay were making the road labels repeat, increasing the transparency of the road lines, and enabled symbol levels on the road lines.
We also looked at using Mobile Day, Mobile Night, Public Safety, and Zoning. However, we ended up not using any of them. The Mobile Day and Mobile Night were too difficult to read once rasterized. Our map service for Public Safety would not work properly in our police and fire departments systems and they ended up continuing to use the Esri Streets basemap. The Zoning basemap's road labels were too difficult to read and our users preferred having zoning as an operational layer instead of a basemap.
Going forward, I am trying to convince city administration to allow us to participate in the Community Maps Program so we can just leverage Esri's basemaps but still see our data. I like the symbology of Esri's vector basemaps. The only thing that is missing are address labels, but we can always overlay those ourselves for our maps. I should add that we will not be moving to vector basemaps until they support exporting/printing across most of platform.
I have used the General Purpose, Imagery Reference Overlay and Zoning basemaps. They were a great help in providing some content for new applications.
I really like the Zoning basemap, because we have a number overlay districts in addition to the base zoning.
Like most folks, I've made a number of tweaks to the General Purpose basemap. Many changes are to emphasize municipal boundaries. There are not an unincorporated areas, so I felt the background needed to be adjusted. Here is the link to the app using the basemap: Easton Maps
Leon
Thank you for your feedback, I really appreciate it. I'm not sure if you have, but you can modify the road label placement if the placement in the GeneralPurpose.mxd and ImageryReferenceOverlay.mxd doesn't satisfy your needs. As for the labels being difficult to read once rasterized, I'll have to look into that. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I'll also look in to making the municipal/city boundary more visible (if I'm understanding you correctly) in the GeneralPurpose.mxd, as well as possibly adjusting the road transparency in the ImageryReferenceOverlay.mxd.
Thanks for you feedback, I really appreciate it. Also, thank you for sharing your General Purpose basemap! I'll look in to the municipal boundaries and how to possibly emphasize them.
Thank you for your response. I have already adjusted the road label placement in our basemaps so that the road names always appear on screen. I ended up not changing the municipal boundary in the basemap because our users prefer having the municipal boundary as an operational layer, so we just use the municipal boundary operational layer to clearly delineate where the municipal boundary ends.
However, as we move away from ArcMap and go to Portal I hope to transition our users to having the municipal boundary in the basemap instead of an operational layer in every web map. So there is renewed interest in clearly marking the edge of the municipal boundary in our basemaps.
Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it. I will look into the DuPage River label and server settings.
Did you use the Set Map Data Sources Python script tool (Set map data sources - Local Government Information Model | ArcGIS for Local Government) to help with resourcing data layers from a File Geodatabase to a SQL Server database?
Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciated it. How do you make operational layers standout against a high color contrast map? I would be interested to look at one if you can share it.
I will take a look at the GeneralPurpose.mxd. You should be able to open it up in ArcGIS 10.3. Its supported on ArcMap versions 10.3 - 10.5.
I fixed the Local Government Basemap download so all mxd's will open in ArcMap 10.3.
Thanks for your feedback, David.
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