At the 2013 International User Conference Esri announced a huge increase in the variety and quality of geographic content published and hosted on ArcGIS Online. This rich set of ready-to-use maps and data is published by Esri, partners and authoritative users and covers many topics relating to people, earth, and life, forming a living atlas of the world.
The living atlas of the world is divided into six content categories.
Esri is in the process of updating each one of these content categories to form the foundation for the entire living atlas with expanding large-scale coverage of Asia, Central and South America, North Africa and the Middle East. High quality content is driving dramatic increases in ArcGIS Online basemap usage (over 14 billion requests in 2012), which is expected to double in 2013.
Esri’s “Community” program is expanding to enhance ArcGIS content beyond basemaps with best available data from the GIS community. We’ve built a new Community Geodatabase to house all data required for updating basemaps as well as all the new living atlas themes. This global geodatabase stores over 20 thematic layers assembled from community and commercial sources and supports more efficient authoring, publishing and updating of maps that contribute to the living atlas of the world. Most exciting of all, this centralized geodatabase will enable the use of Community Maps contributors’ data in more basemaps and will support vector delivery of basemaps in the near future.
Over the remainder of this year look for several other important milestones for Community Maps: a complete transition to the updated Topographic map design, use of OpenStreetMap data in areas where commercial and contributor content is lacking and new Imagery Hybrid and Polar projection designs.
To find out all of the details on these and other ArcGIS Online Content initiatives that were announced at the 2013 UC, check out the ArcGIS Online Content technical workshop video recording.