Make Separate Services for Basemap Annotation

867
2
09-30-2011 10:33 AM
Status: Open
MattSayler
Occasional Contributor II
I'd like to see the annotation for basemaps set up as separate services so that they can be placed separately within the layer tree. That would allow someone to choose whether or not their data covers them up.
 
It would also allow for the use of just the basemap, without annotation, or just the basemap annotation iteslf, which I could see being potentially useful.
2 Comments
JesseVarner
I agree. The annotations for the Ocean Basemap and the new National Geographic Basemap are very good quality, and it would be very nice to be able to overlay these on top of my own basemaps. The seafloor feature names are especially useful to me.

I like how the "Light Gray Reference" is set up as a separate map service: http://services.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/Canvas/World_Light_Gray_Reference/MapServer

It would be nice if a similar overlay service contained the country/admin boundaries as well as the seafloor feature names, like the Ocean and NatGeo maps.

DouglasCaldwell
I agree. The basemaps with labels are nice, but it is difficult to work around them if you have your own labels that you wish to add to the map. You have to look at the individual basemaps and their scale dependencies and then remove your own labels ... a complex process. It would be better if you could simply turn the annotation off. See example below with name of Minnesota.
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