Sharing, Finding, and Discovering Authoritative Geospatial Data: Part 1
All I wanted to find… was the Great Wall of China. I didn’t need each historic section, or attributes related to the materials used. I just wanted a basic polyline, of the Great Wall, that I could use in ArcGIS Online. I couldn’t find it.
ArcGIS Online holds so much promise for data sharing… but we are still hiding an amazing wealth of data away in silos. Data has been siloed off because of a lack of data sharing, poor metadata, permissions issues, and others. But we can start to tear down some of these walls!
Why should we care?
- You can help students, researchers, and the general public discover authoritative spatial data
- You can provide ‘credit’ to your students and researchers and widely promote your university, college, research center, etc.
- You can encourage your users, teachers, students, and researchers to contribute to and continue building a global body of spatial data
Over the course of a series of blogs, I am going to lay out some best practices for how the academic community can start sharing more maps and data. When we go to search for content in ArcGIS Online, we should have the ability to search across the world’s largest collection of geospatial data ever created.
Next year, when I go and search for ‘Great Wall’, I want to see results from academics and users that have been maintaining and building these datasets (that I know exist!) for decades.
This blog (Part 1) is about getting your organization ready. We are going to focus on the best practices and settings that you can get in place to ensure that data sharing and discovery is ready to go.
Get your organization ready…
The first step to ensuring that your research center or institution is ready to share data more broadly, is by conducting some initial ‘housekeeping’ to get prepared.
You might have taken all of these steps already. If you have 'great!', but they are worth reviewing to ensure that your ArcGIS organization has its best foot forward.
Organization settings
Under ‘Settings, General’, here are a few things that you should review.
- Organization profile
- Double check to ensure your ‘Name’ reflects your organization
- Add a logo for your university or center
- Add a summary of your university or center
- Navigation bar
- Under ‘Manage navigation bar links’ you have the ability to hide or display different global sections of your ArcGIS Online organization. The options that are more applicable in this case, is anything that has an ‘Everyone’ option. For example, you have the ability to let anyone who navigates to your ‘global’ page see the Gallery tab and then visit your organizations Gallery page, or Featured Groups.
Logo? check. Name? check. Summary? check.
Home page
ArcGIS Online includes a ‘Home page editor’ – which lets you modify the look and feel of your landing page. I would recommend modifying the default settings and including some ‘featured maps and apps’ on the page, or a basic description of your university/center.
There are a range of different options/tools that let you quickly style a nice-looking landing page.
Within the home page editor, you also have the ability to enable to a footer for your page that includes contact information.
You can do better than this!
While you can also setup Hub sites, Experience Builder applications, or other websites, etc. to serve as the ‘landing page’ for your geospatial content, if you enable public sharing and ‘verify your organization’, users will still be able to find their way to your front page. So, it’s a good practice to put in a little time and effort.
Here is a really nice example from Northeastern University:
Optional settings
It was already discussed briefly under the ‘Navigation bar’ organization setting options, but beyond just letting public users access your landing page and content, you can also enable access to a ‘Gallery’ and ‘Featured Groups’.
- ArcGIS Online ‘Gallery’
- An ArcGIS Online ‘Gallery’ is basically a built-in, curated data/map discovery app. Users can select a group that they want the gallery to use and then any content added to the group is discoverable in the Gallery. Or, the Gallery can simply feature all of your organization’s shared content.
- Featured Groups
- Similar to the Gallery, this offers organizations a way to feature specific projects or content. You could also create a set of authoritative groups (for specific research, projects, classes, years, etc.) and make those visible to anyone who visits your organization.
For example, Colorado State University has selected a number of great StoryMaps, mapping applications, Hubs, and other content that they have set as ‘Featured Content’:
Great job Colorado State!
Allow Anonymous Access
Under ‘Settings, Security’ – the first option is to ‘Allow anonymous access to your organization’s website’.
This simply means that when users visit your ArcGIS Online URL, they will be able to see the homepage. Prior to enabline this setting, we covered all of the other settings you would want to review.
Enabling this setting does not mean that users will be able to 'log into' your organization. They will simply be able to search, view, and use content that is shared with 'Everyone'.
Verify your organization
When you ‘verify your organization’, you have the ability to put a ‘stamp of authority’ on any content that you share.
Anyone if your organization cannot label their content as 'authoritative', only administrators or users with 'Update Content' enabled under the Admin. user role settings have this capability. (This will be covered in more detail in the follow-up blog).
For example, the City of Cambridge shares their ‘Parcels’ dataset, as shown in the screenshot below:
The 2 things to note in this image is that ‘City of Cambridge’ is listed as the ‘owner’ of the dataset. Clicking on that name, would bring users to the organization homepage or gallery. There is a still a username/individual that ‘owns’ the content, but the organization is now highlighted, which provides a tie-back to your university, college, or research center.
To verify your organization, you can find the request under the General settings for your ArcGIS Online organization:
By selecting ‘Verify organization’, a basic e-mail template will open that you can send to Esri Customer Service. Customer service then confirms that the organization name and customer name are the same.
Close
After stepping through this blog, your organization should be ‘ready’ to jump onto the world stage. In a follow-up post, we will dive into the specifics related to items (metadata, descriptions, etc.) to ensure that your content is easy to find and access.
We have the foundation built… the next step is loading up your organization with amazing data, maps, and applications.