Can contributors all add to the same featureclass on ArcGIS Hub?

[MichaelWijtenburg]

I don't know how to access a working sample of ArcGIS HUB, so I'm making a few assumptions about how it works. 

It looks like a great solution to the problem of how we get a consolidated view from multiple organisations. 

However, there is one specific function that will make it a friction-less user experience... or not. I'm hoping someone can explain to me how it works. 

Let's say a hub is established, and companies A, B C etc all collaborate on it. 

Each company is providing the exact same data, the same structure, the same attributes, fields, etc. The only difference is content.

I am keenly interested to know whether it is possible for each of the companies to submit their data to the same feature class. In other words, all the data ends up being consolidated in one data set (Feature class) 

I suspect that this is contrary to the conceptual principle of what the hub represents, in which case then, I have a second question. Am I able to use the Hub as just another published data source, which I can connect to, and I will do the aggregation of all the different datasets in house, using FME. This would mean that the hub view is multiple layers of data originating from different organisations, but internally, we can use it as a single layer, which would be a win-win. 

Hope that makes sense. 

[Anonymous User]

There's a few ways to skin this cat! happy to have other colleagues chime in or tell me some of these ideas are wrong 😉

1. I believe you could have users edit a feature service you own with edit access and proper sharing with existing logins between the 3 orgs. It would have to be coordinated across the 3 organizations and you are giving them access to one of your services
2. Even though they have their own accounts (or saying they don't), Hub makes it easy for you to have those 3 organizations be invited or sign up for a user as a part of YOUR hub's community....so they can all work on a feature service in your org directly (as well as other items). The advantage of this is you retain administrative control over people working in your system (i.e. you can revoke access from people doing it wrong....you can also manage/administer/see other content they're making and you ultimately own everything they do from a licensing/data perspective). Disadvantage is they have to have a login for that community account specific for this work.
3. Have them each make a replica feature service in their orgs and logically combine them using something like a Koop adapter. This one is technical but you can make many services "look like" one service using Koop. Advantage of this is everyone gets to own/keep their own data. Disadvantage is you have to make sure you agree to a data schema. 
4. Make a survey for one-way data collection to a single service. Give access to this to users via groups/sharing.

[SydneyBohn]

Michael Wijtenburg‌

To add to Graham's second suggestion, one method of doing this kind of data consolidation workflow would be to use hosted feature layer views in ArcGIS Online. You can essentially publish a single parent layer with all the appropriate fields and create hosted views based off of that parent layer. The hosted views can be made editable independently of the parent layer so theoretically you could have three separate views for each of the different organizations to load their data into without having to make the parent layer editable for everyone. Edits made in the views will also automatically persist into the parent layer that the view is created from so you wouldn't have to manually reconcile those updates.

There would have to be some planning involved to decide how exactly you wanted to configure the view settings in order to get it to work the way you want(there are quite a few settings to choose from) BUT this is one way to do it directly inside ArcGIS Online.

Also as a note, if the other users don't have their own ArcGIS Online organizational account, they would need to be a part of yours in order to edit "their" view. But if they do have their own organization, you could always share the views to a group that has those members added to it and they could edit the data that way.

This is just a brief overview but if hosted feature layer views sound like they might work for you, I'd definitely suggest reading up on them more:

How to create hosted views: https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/manage-data/create-hosted-views.htm

Getting stated with hosted views (blog post from when views were introduced in AGOL): https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-online/uncategorized/getting-started-with-hosted-fe...

I hope this helps! Let us know if you have any other questions

- Sydney

Esri Support Services