Future Analytics Capabilities of OpenData

Question

I know that OpenData is very much in its infancy.  I would like to commend the development team for a job tremendously done at working out some bugs and correcting some functionalities.  So far I am very impressed with the product.

That being said, there are a couple of things that I would like to suggest for future development.  This is not an exhaustive list, and if anyone else has something to add, I'm sure the team will see it and take it under advisement for POSSIBLE future enhancements (noting that I am in no way connected with ESRI, other than being a user):

* other download format types, for example file geodatabase (.gdb).  I'm assuming that ESRI would export this .gdb out in the earliest version that the company still technically supports, which currently to my knowledge is a 10.0 gdb
* some sort of analytics to see how many times a dataset has been viewed/ downloaded/ shared/ etc. over the last X period of time (my preference would be monthly, quarterly, and annually, but others may have different requests.  I'm thinking something close to Google Analytics, but don't know exactly what I'm thinking of.

So again, thanks ESRI's OpenData Development team (Andrew Turner Daniel Fenton Courtney Claessens and others whom I don't know yet) for all their hard work in getting this brilliant tool up and running for us (the GIS community).

MalcolmJ · Answer

Since you asked.... these would be my top three.

1. Instead of filtering by map view (or in addition to), I would like users to be able to draw on the map around an area of interest to filter/download by.

2. The ability to download shapefiles in projections other than WGS84 would be useful, as companies, organisations etc that would download our data would mostly be using a local projection rather than a global one.

3. Domain value descriptions do not currently come through to open data. It would be useful if it did as we have a few datasets using domains.

DanielFenton1 · Answer

Hi Chris,

Thank you for your feedback and your ideas, we love to hear it.

As to your two specific requests:

1. We have discussed additional formats quite a bit internally. Our stance is that we would like to support open formats. As an alternative to file geodatabases we have considered geopackages. Are you familiar with the format? Would that fill the same needs that are driving your request for fgdb?

See here for some info about geopackages.

2. We are working right now on a feature that would allow you to see site views, dataset views and download counts aggregated across your site over the last 30 days. This is just our first step to additional analytics. But look for much more over the next 6 months.

Please keep the feedback and the ideas coming!

Daniel Fenton

Product Engineer | Open Data