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Introducing metadata fallbacks for creator and organization labels

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07-28-2022 06:06 AM
ThomasHervey1
Esri Contributor
2 4 722

Displaying relevant metadata is critical for establishing trust and understanding from your site’s users. That is why we are introducing the ability to set the label for both the creator and organization on content view pages. Soon, Hub will prioritize contact values from item metadata to generate these labels. When a value is missing, ArcGIS Hub will fall back to the next best option just as it does today. We recommend that you review your current item metadata, take advantage of this capability, and let us know what other metadata configurations you would like to see.

In this blog post we will briefly explain what happens today, what is changing, what you need to know, and what's coming next.

 

What happens today?

Today, when you look below the title on a content view page, you will see labels for the item’s creator (owner) and the item’s organization (source). In certain cases, when metadata are missing or a user or an organization are private, ArcGIS Hub will show a fallback value such as “Private Member” or “private organization.”

Screen Shot 2022-07-27 at 10.32.05 AM.png

 

Above is a screenshot of the Tahoe Layers content view page in ArcGIS Hub. The existing owner and organization item details are shown in the creator and organization labels.

 

What is changing?

We know how much work ArcGIS Hub content managers put into metadata. So we want to start putting it to use in more places. Certain customers may have a team member who creates content for their Hub site, but may not want their name displayed. This is the perfect opportunity to update the item metadata and change the label that your users will see.

In addition to the existing fallback mentioned above, ArcGIS Hub will prioritize certain item metadata fields in the label. If an item has “citation” or “contact” metadata, then ArcGIS Hub will use these values. This will allow content managers to manually set owner and organization information. This behavior aligns the content view pages with existing web help documentation in the ArcGIS Hub FAQ section.


To do this, update an item’s metadata and ArcGIS Hub will use the fallback listed below:

Creator label

  • Item metadata
    • Resource > Citation > Contact > Individual Name
    • Resource > Contact > Individual Name
    • Metadata > Contact > Individual Name
  • Item owner’s full name
  • "Private Member" (only applicable if Item owner is private)


Organization label

  • Item metadata
    • Resource / Citation / Contact / Organization Name
    • Resource / Contact / Organization Name
    • Metadata / Contact / Organization Name
  • Item’s organization name
  • "Private Organization" (only applicable if item’s organization is private)
  • "External Organization" (only applicable if content is from an external organization)

 

Screen Shot 2022-07-27 at 10.26.59 AM.png

Above is a screenshot of the Metadata editor in ArcGIS Online for the Tahoe Layers item. We have added contact values for the “Individual Name” and “Organization Name” fields.

 

Screen Shot 2022-07-27 at 10.29.47 AM.png

Above is a screenshot of the Tahoe Layers content view page in ArcGIS Hub. The newly added metadata fields are shown in the creator and organization labels.

 

What do I need to know?

On Tuesday August 9th, this change will go into effect with the weekly scheduled release.  We listened and decided to make a few changes before release. The ArcGIS Hub team is developing an option for users to specify which value they want for display. By default, this option will use the full fallback above, but users will be able to specify a value. Stay tuned to this blog post for updates on this setting and the release date.

 

What’s coming next?

The ArcGIS Hub team has heard from users who want the ability to customize and configure what is displayed on content view pages. Such requests include the ability to hide certain metadata fields, remove links, or manually set the values. The ArcGIS Hub team is in the planning phase for this work and we're gathering requirements from our users.Stay tuned for future developments!

If you have an idea for a configuration that you would like to see on the content view pages, add a comment on this blog and submit an idea on the ArcGIS Hub Ideas board so that other members of the community can comment and give kudos for your idea.

 

Tags (3)
4 Comments
Alex-Santos
Occasional Contributor

Overall this update is good since I've often had to take ownership of items from individuals to the DCGISopendata administrator account in order to publish to opendata.dc.gov. This workflow always presented an issue when it came time to make an update from the original individual. So thank you! But now we need to perform some quick cleanup.

This update presents a new issue for me. Much of our metadata cites our distributor as the organization name (DC Office of the Chief Technology Officer) with the manager as individual name; it is not left blank as this article suggests. The update will overwrite DCGISopendata in all of our content. Users accustomed to seeing DCGISopendata in organization searches - in ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Desktop - will now see "DC Office of the Chief Technology Officer." In hub searches they're used to seeing "Open Data DC." Please correct me if I'm mistaken. I hope I am. See the image showing what many of our items include now. Shown on hub site.

Can you set this update as optional somehow? A toggle in hub settings or similar to how you rolled out the font update where saving would trigger the update.

Capture.JPG

ThomasHervey1
Esri Contributor

@Alex-Santos thanks for your feedback. I appreciate your comments and desire to maintain a strong metadata workflow. I've discussed options with the team and we're considering an in-app setting to configure which value is displayed on the content views (ex. contact metadata, item owner, etc.).  

Taking this approach would be the first pattern for configuring displays on the content views, and so the change may take some time. In the meantime, we will hold off on releasing this change. Stay tuned for updates.

Alex-Santos
Occasional Contributor

Good morning @ThomasHervey1 - continuing to better organize here. Our analysts author metadata within ArcGIS Pro and then push to ArcGIS Online. I'd like to update the team on how to cite originators vs points of contact so they appear in hub correctly. The metadata manager in Pro is different than the mapping you describe here.

  • Will hub pick up citation contact within overview? How is overview mapped to AGOL?
  • We specify originator vs point of contact. Will originator be prioritized?

In the image below we include the originating agency under Overview > Citation Contact. This is the preferred creator and organization label to show in hub. Under Resource > Points of Contact is where we plan to place the poc/distributor. Is this correct?

ArcGIS_Pro_Metadata_Editor.PNG

GarthHoxsie-Quinn
New Contributor III

Hello to you both. I found this to be helpful, more so in understanding who/what citation was referring to. We have been trying to become better concerning our metadata and for whatever reason doing it in AGOL seems easier than in Pro. We have also had issues with metadata not transferring when we upload data to AGOL, so it is nice to know that in AGOL it isn't super complicated.

I know this isn't really what the intent of your conversation was but it helped.

About the Author
Thomas Hervey is working on search, discovery, content management, and interoperability tools in support of community collaboration and engagement on the ArcGIS Hub and Enterprise Sites team.