Organising Third Party Data in ArcGIS Hub

[AnthonyJonesRSK]

Hi,

We have been developing a hub site for our staff that collates lots of useful data from various providers. This often includes simply sharing features services from these external providers to our hub content group so it's all available in one place. The issue we're having is categorising this data as we don't own the feature services so we cannot add our own tags or categories to them. We are aware of a couple of workarounds:

• We could build our own feature services on top of the URLs of these external services allowing us to tag/categorise them. Ideally we'd like to avoid this as this then requires that we manage these feature services rather than just using those already available.
• We could categorise the data using groups. We are doing this already to categorise datasets by country but we would like the categories to be available on the main content page on the left so users can select the categories they need there and change them as needed.

We had thought we'd found an ideal solution by applying group categories in the main hub content group. In the group we were able to categorise all datasets whether we owned them or not and then use the filters in the group to find particular data. These categories pulled through to the hub content site but we realised they only work for the datasets we own. Is there anyway this could be updated so that group categories work for all datasets in the hub?

Or ideally, would it be possible to allow categories/tags to be overridden with a set of hub categories that could be applied to any datasets hosted in the hub? At the moment our hub contains a wide variety of tags and categories and it would be great to be able to streamline this.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Anthony

[JustinPrather]

@AnthonyJonesRSK –

Thanks for your post. Could you clarify a couple points:

1. For a group that you or someone in your organization owns, after creating group categories, you were not able to apply content from another organization to one of the group's categories? 
2. Are you requesting for group categories to be visible as a filter within Hub? I believe you were requesting in the search results (siteURL/search). Did I understand that correctly? Did you have other use cases? 
3. Within this idea of yours, is one of your main goals to allow your colleagues to parse content by who own the content? 

[AnthonyJonesRSK]

Hi @JustinPrather,

Thank you for the response on this. See below for clarifications on your questions:

1. Apologies, I've realised that I've confused things here. I thought group categories where pulling through to the hub but on further investigation it looks like the ones we were seeing were organisation categories that had since been deleted. We'd used the same categories for testing (Test 1, Test 2) on the data content group but had previously tried these as organisation categories. I thought after deleting the org categories that they would be removed from the layers but it looks like they persist. Anyway, it turns out you can use group categories on data from another organisation (you can then use them to filter data on the group items page) but these group categories are not visible in the hub site.

2. Having group categories available as a filter in the hub would be useful as they can be applied to data from other organisations. However, a general way to apply categories within hub would be useful and have it so that any other categories/tags can be overridden. The reason is that we have data from various organisations in our hub but we have no way to control how they're categorised or tagged so in a hub that has 177 datasets within it we currently have 48 categories and 199 tags which makes filtering a bit messy. It would be great if we could streamline this to core categories so our users can find similar content more easily.

3. The ability to parse content by owner would be useful as I can see that doesn't appear to be available at the moment. The main thing thought would be to filter by categories we have applied.

If you need any more information please do let me know and thanks again for your response.

Anthony

[AnthonyJonesRSK]

Hi @JustinPrather,

Just wanted to check whether my response below made sense? Are these category options something that would be possible in Hub? Is it worth me submitting them as an idea?

Thanks

Anthony

[JustinPrather]

@AnthonyJonesRSK -

Thanks for the addition information. 

To clarify further, are you hoping to have group categories available as filters in the Hub Site search experience? 

However, a general way to apply categories within hub would be useful and have it so that any other categories/tags can be overridden. The reason is that we have data from various organisations in our hub but we have no way to control how they're categorised or tagged so in a hub that has 177 datasets within it we currently have 48 categories and 199 tags which makes filtering a bit messy.

It sounds like you are requesting a way to categorize and tag items (particularly for items not in your organization) in Hub in addition to group categories. Is this correct? 

The ability to parse content by owner would be useful as I can see that doesn't appear to be available at the moment.

This would be in addition to the "Source", correct? 

[AnthonyJonesRSK]

Hi @JustinPrather,

Thanks again for your response.

Group filters look to work already in the hub site but not for data outside of our own portal as we cannot apply our own categories to these. 

And yes, a way to set categories for data added to the hub content group that overrides other categories/tags would be great. At the moment we're at the mercy of whatever categories were applied by the external data owners so we have a wide range of categories that we'd like to consolidate into less options. 

I don't know if I'm missing something but I can't see the source option in our hub. Is that an option only available in premium?

Thanks

Anthony

[JustinPrather]

@AnthonyJonesRSK –

Feel free to submit any ideas that you have. Describing your use case in the ideas I'm sure would be helpful for others in Esri Community.

As for the Source facet that you are not seeing ... do you have a URL to share?