Connect ArcGIS Pro Directly to City Open Data Portals

[MohammadAlattar]

I’d love to see ArcGIS Pro make it easier to pull in open data directly from city and government data portals (for example, the NYC Crime dataset on NYC Open Data: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYC-crime/qb7u-rbmr/about_data). Right now, bringing in these kinds of datasets often means manually downloading and preparing the files, which can be time-consuming and repetitive.

It would be great if ArcGIS Pro could connect directly to popular open data APIs (Socrata, CKAN, APIs from cities like NYC, Chicago, etc.) and let users browse, preview, and import datasets straight into a project with a few clicks. This would streamline workflows, save time, and make it much more convenient to work with up-to-date city data for mapping, analysis, and visualization.

[VenkataKondepati]

This is a great idea, but the reality is that ArcGIS Pro is currently built to speak "Esri REST" fluently while being mostly "deaf" to Socrata or CKAN (the engines behind NYC and Chicago data).

Right now, you’re forced to be a "Data Janitor"—downloading CSVs, cleaning headers, and running "XY Table to Point." By the time you're done, the data is already stale. While Esri pushes ArcGIS Hub as the solution, many major cities stay on Socrata.

The "Ask": We need a native Open Data Connector in the Catalog pane. Just like adding a Database Connection, we should be able to paste a portal URL and have Pro parse the API metadata into a searchable folder. This turns a manual "download" into a "live stream" of city data.