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Enforce naming conventions in the Living Atlas

HollyTorpey_LSA

Idea:
Impose naming conventions on Living Atlas content that require inclusion of the spatial extent of the layer in the name. Something like continent + country abbreviation + State/Province abbreviation + Locality + subject matter. For example: North America-US Roads or North America-US-CA-Los Angeles - Roads. This would allow users to sort search results alphabetically and then and quickly scroll down to their geographic area of interest.

Reason:
It seems like the Living Atlas is now including a lot more local and regional data. I'm not strictly opposed to this, but I really hope that Esri's Living Atlas team will start enforcing some naming conventions so that users can tell what each dataset represents.

For example, a search in Pro's Catalog pane for "Roads" returns results like RoadCenterline and TCT Road Centerline. The former is for the city of Redding, CA, USA and the latter is for Cape Town, South Africa. But users can't tell what the spatial extent is for either layer without clicking through to its item details page. This can get time consuming and frustrating.

Similarly, those results include a layer called Transportation that is US-based, and a map named National Road Network that is Canadian, but their countries of origin are not obvious from their layer names. I have to hover over each one and deduce from its owner name where the data is from.

I know there are filters that allow us to subset by Region and Location, but these don't seem to work all the time. Example:

My understanding is that the Living Atlas is supposed to be a curated catalog of authoritative data, and I've found it very useful in the past. Lately, though, it is starting to feel cluttered, unmanaged, and not that different from the rest of ArcGIS Online. I think enforcing some naming conventions would help.

Thanks!

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Status: Open

Comments

LisaBerry

Thank you for your feedback on this topic. I will send this to the team for them to take a look and review.

JimHerries

Thanks for this feedback, this is good to have. I'd like to 1) validate your observation and share a best practice in Pro for all readers; 2) share important background about Search for anyone who is building and sharing layers/maps/content, and 3) look at options coming to Living Atlas curation soon.

Search satisfaction increases when the item publishers optimize their item's Title, Summary, Description, Thumbnail etc. to answer the question "what is this?" for their intended audience. But if users are not finding what they expect at the Search step, it's definitely time to assess what the end user can do, and what the item owners can do (including Living Atlas content).

Our research has shown that Location is one of the key components people want to see in an item Title. So you are onto something everyone can also consider in their publishing.

A hierarchical location structure to an item's location is an interesting idea. It does have some challenges, like length and language used. It could be that the Title is not the best place to put this, but other ideas are coming to mind, like the Description might be a great place for a "location hierarchy" statement in as many languages as the owner of the item cares to support.

Location information is searchable in both Pro and Online. Let's look at Pro.

In Pro, as your screenshots show, only Title appears in some search results panel. For the sake of other readers who like me may have missed it at first, there is a button in the top right corner that adds another panel to show additional item details. This is the information the user has to decide whether they want to try this layer or map out.

As we continue to improve Titles of items in Living Atlas, there are two options in Pro for searching by map extent and/or by Region. Find the Filter button next to the Search term and try filtering by map extent and/or by Region. This narrows the results in most cases.

It will never work all the time for all situations, but it will narrow the field. Why? You may still see search results that include

items that have global or continent-sized content (e.g. global air quality, or OpenStreetMap Highways for North America), and
items whose extent happens to include additional areas (e.g. most U.S. layers include much of Canada in their extent because a rectangle that includes AK, HI and the lower 48 states will also include much of Canada and Caribbean Islands and much of Mexico), and
occasionally items whose extent was defined by the owner incorrectly for some reason

Background

Some background: Living Atlas can enforce some things like "your item must be shared public, or it will be removed from Living Atlas immediately." That's an easy one to detect and act upon without involvement of the person owning the item. Living Atlas cannot enforce subjective things, like what should be in a title, but we can and do encourage things via its Nomination app and published guidance about the rules it uses.

Anyone is welcome to log into that Nomination app to score their item, by the way. You don't have to nominate it to get a score on how well your item fits current Living Atlas standards. We show you a score for your item, so that you choose which suggested improvements to take action on.

In recent months, we culled anything with a score lower than 80 (out of 100). I have personally removed about 1000 items from Living Atlas in the past year, and an additional 20+ curators are likewise focused on improving the quality of what's in Living Atlas in their country and removing anything that is no longer meeting updated standards.

More background: search is interesting because in our testing, we find people have a range of behaviors when searching for something. Those behaviors range from search for a pretty unique word or acronym (e.g. search for 'openstreetmap') and search using a very broad term (e.g. "search for 'roads' ?"

Broad terms appear in vastly greater numbers of items, so it's not as satisfying a search result and harder to satisfy because the person may be thinking "What road centerlines do you have for Alberta, Canada" but all they typed in was "roads." What the user has in their head and what they do on the UX can be two very different things.

Going Forward

The Living Atlas team is looking at options to encourage item owners to include certain information in their item's Title and Summary, since those are the two things visible in most search results. Location information is already confirmed to be a key component of search result satisfaction because it helps gives confidence that an item has what the user intends in terms of data coverage.

The title also usually includes the item's topic, everything from something short like "Highways" to something detailed like "Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators- Air Pollutant Emission Indicators."

Source is often placed in the Title as well, e.g. "OpenStreetmap Highways of North America." Organizations with short names or acronyms like USDA can easily squeeze Source information into a title, but sometimes also want to squeeze in the name of the program at the source organization responsible for the item, e.g. "USDA Census of Agriculture 2022 - Almond Production"

Year/Vintage has also been valuable to search results, since people want to know how old the data is, whether it is the latest available vintage (e.g. 2020 census or 2010 census?)

The Title has only so much space and so it becomes an editorial choice what to prioritize: Location, Topic, Source, Year/Vintage

Our thought is to update the Living Atlas nomination app to check for those four things to be present in the Title and/or Summary. That gives the publisher of the item some freedom to decided where to put each of the four components, and to what detail. "USDA" could be in the title but also spelled out in the Summary "United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)." The fact that "United States" is also a location ticks the box for Location (though USDA is likely a hint as well), but the Summary can state explicitly "coverage for the 50 states" to be more clear about what is and is not covered (no territories). So a future version of the Living Atlas nomination app might suggest "USDA Census of Agriculture 2022 - Almond Production for the U.S." but ultimately the final choices will always be made by the owner of the items.

It is an evolving system and I welcome additional input on this as we continue to raise the bar for Living Atlas content.