Esri’s new ArcGIS Open Data Site Available for Open Data

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Susan Smith
Susan Smith has worked as an editor and writer in the technology industry for over 16 years. As an editor she has been responsible for the launch of a number of technology trade publications, both in print and online. Currently, Susan is the Editor of GISCafe and AECCafe, as well as those sites’ … More »

Esri’s new ArcGIS Open Data Site Available for Open Data Sharing

February 11th, 2015 by Susan Smith

Esri announced the launch of a new site aimed to help citizens locate organizations sharing open data around the world and provide direct access to thousands of open government datasets. Citizens can search, download, filter, and visualize this data through their web browser or mobile device.

Andrew Turner, CTO of Esri’s DC R&D Center, said that the open data application is mobile responsive and provides a more focused experience on small screens and devices. “For that reason we hide the filtering controls based on our user testing,” said Turner. “So people can find data, bookmark and “download it”. Then they can visit it later on a larger screen (tablet or desktop) to do additional filtering and other capabilities.”

Since July 2014, more than 1,200 organizations from all levels of government, including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the cities of Raleigh, North Carolina; Tampa, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Muroran, Japan, have used Esri’s ArcGIS Open Data to configure custom open data sites to serve local citizens and businesses. Now the public can search across all these sites to find authoritative data by location and topic.

Currently all the data are from organizations who are authoritatively managing and publishing the data. Some of these data do included citizen gathered data but it is curated by the government or NGO agencies that requested the information. These data are made available as public, open licensed, and machine readable open formats.”In the future we may provide “citizen contributed” data that abides by these open data principles,” said Turner.

“We are excited about the large number of organizations currently sharing open data and believe we have a great opportunity to boost global support for open data and open knowledge,” said Turner. “As more of the 380,000 organizations we work with across the globe begin to contribute open data, we will be able to help foster innovation by connecting the millions of datasets created by government agencies and shared through ArcGIS Open Data.”

Those who are authorized to add to the Open Data database include any of the hundreds of thousands of governments agencies, businesses, groups and other organizations who use ArcGIS to manage and publish their data.

Any organization can make its data available through ArcGIS Open Data, and people can now discover this data by visiting opendata.arcgis.com.

Tags: ArcGIS, cloud, crowdsourcing, data, ESRI, intelligence, location, maps, mobile, NASA, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, NOAA, social media, USGS

Categories: ArcGIS, ArcGIS Online, citizen science, cloud, cloud network analytics, conversion, crowd source, data, Esri, geocoding, geomatics, geospatial, GIS, Google, GPS, integrated GIS solutions, iPhone, LBS, lidar, location based sensor fusion, location based services, location intelligence, mapping, mobile, NASA, NGA, OCG GeoPackage, Online GIS courses, Oracle Spatial, satellite imagery, sensors, U.S. Census, USGS

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