Tuesday, June 30. 2009

ArcGIS Online Sharing in Open Beta: Does this change geodata sharing?

ESRI has opened up ArcGIS Online sharing app into an open beta. Anyone can use the site but a ESRI Global Account allows collaboration and data sharing.

The bottom line is this is an ESRI focused portal for finding, sharing and using maps, layers and tools. You can find data published by ESRI or its users via a text search and add it to your ArcMap session or build an online map from it. As a member, you get your own content page where you can access local maps, layers and tools. You can keep them private or share them with everyone or just with a selected group or groups. You can read about ArcGIS Online in the ArcGIS Online blog or get a video demo from the site.

This is something ESRI has been alluding to for some time and I expect this offering to be launched more formally at the User Conference in a few weeks. So, does it change anything? It's hard to say at this early point. I'll suggest that its predecessors include the Geography Network and Geospatial One-Stop and its peers/relatives include things like GeoCommons and perhaps WeoGeo and VoyagerGIS. It could even be said to be related to ERDAS Titan and the iTunes store. Did you lose me on that last one?

As introduced thus far, ArcGIS Online seems to be 100% focused on sharing ESRI maps, data and tools. I did note that one can set up a different default tool to view the data (other than ArcGIS), but it was unclear what types of data are supported for sharing. It'll be interesting to see how ArcGIS Online is presented to the larger GIS community with regard to other data types. Also interesting to contemplate: Will the large ESRI user community share its data (even with selected groups) via ArcGIS Online? Finally, how will ArcGIS Online work with state, country and worldwide efforts at data sharing? Would a city need/want/be expected to share its data via Geospatial One-Stop and ArcGIS Online? What about federal agencies? Will they need to be on those two portals and on Data.gov?

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in ESRI at 16:38 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

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