People everywhere are familiar with maps and how to use them. Maps can communicate and convey large amounts of information in an organized, understandable way. Maps and geography are truly a common language.
The world is ready for more maps, and ready to put them to work. They appreciate and know how to use these maps in consumer-based applications. It's no secret that maps are one of the most universally used of all digital reports.
In the past decade, the web has changed how we do computing, and so has the paradigm for how people access and use information. People use the web and smartphones for a sophisticated range of activities in which they apply advanced information. On the web, systems like Google Maps have familiarized millions of people with how to work with maps online. For example, everyone uses online maps to locate businesses, use street-level views, to navigate and find directions, and to mash up their own notes and photos onto map views. Maps are a standard feature on the increasingly ubiquitous smartphones and tablets and have rapidly become a standard feature in cars.
Given that, here's a new way to think about GIS:
The purpose of GIS is to create, share, and apply useful map-based information products that add value to the work of your organization as well as to create and manage the necessary foundational geographic information to power your maps.
The new GIS vision is that people access and use online GIS maps on their smartphones and mobile devices, from a variety of organizational websites, and from internal networks that are part of their organization's computing network. These online maps are assembled by combining map services with related GIS services on the web into online map mashups.
Of course, GIS can be used to generate many other types of reports and informational products. However, the map is at the center of these, and people understand and use these other reports within a map-oriented context.
What is an ArcGIS map?
If you are a current ArcGIS user, you already know about the power of maps. When you go into a meeting with a map there's a special reaction you get from people. They gather around and start pointing at things and discussing issues.
ArcGIS is a system that enables people to work with your online maps and associated geographic information. Many kinds of maps can be created with ArcGIS. The most interesting are interactive, intelligent maps that display, integrate, and synthesize rich layers of geographic and descriptive information from various sources. These ArcGIS maps give you an interactive window through which you can visualize, explore, and analyze this information.
You can think of these maps as a completely new kind of information product that combines authoritative data with the analytical, visualization, and data management tools of professional GIS. These tools range from attribute reports, rich thematic displays, informative pop-up windows, dynamic graphs, time sliders, and intelligent template-based data collection, to geostatistics, geoprocessing, and predictive modeling.
For example, in an organization, ArcGIS maps are used to:
- Enable workers to collect and store up-to-date data about the enterprise's facilities and customers.
- Enable planners to analyze the up-to-date data to find the best locations for a new facility.
- Communicate the results of this planning work to their management team.
- Plan the engineering and construction of a facility.
- Inform partners and the public about a facility.
- Manage the operation of a facility.
Maps that support these tasks contain the information required for the specific job, such as demographic data for the planning map, geotechnical data for the engineering maps, live data feeds from sensors, GPS for the operations management maps, and so on. These data can be managed in centralized databases, enabling the same core datasets, such as facility locations, to be used by a range of useful maps and apps.
ArcGIS maps can be deployed in different ways too. Data collection maps may be on mobile devices for use in the field, the maps planners use may be deployed on desktop computers, maps used for briefing management may be included in printed reports or embedded in executive information systems, the public outreach maps may be on the web, and so on. Interactive maps are configured within useful applications that provide the appropriate tools and user interfaces, for example, editing tools and feature creation templates for data collection maps, analytical tools like demand forecasting models for planning maps, and so on.
The key point here is that the ArcGIS system provides numerous ways to leverage the capabilities of intelligent maps for hundreds of different applications. In short, ArcGIS maps can encapsulate and deliver everything you do in a GIS.
Interactive ArcGIS web maps
Explore web maps from the user community in the ArcGIS Online gallery
An ArcGIS web map is a set of map layers with a title, extent, and selected map capabilities that can be enabled, such as feature pop-up windows, time-aware layers, editing, and analytical capabilities. Web maps are created using GIS data feeds such as basemaps, map services, other GIS services, and operational datasets. Each web map is designed to communicate a message and to support a specific audience and specific operations.
A web map is a ready-to-use, interactive map containing useful information. It is an online resource that can be opened and used in a standard web browser, a mobile device, or in a desktop map viewer.
Here are some interesting web map examples:
This web map is presented with an uncluttered user interface, attractive interactive pop-up windows, and a time-slider control.
Where are the uninsured? This web map compares patterns of health insurance with other demographic factors.
This map looks at how patterns of unemployment relate to regional changes in population.
The Ocean Basemap can be used by anyone interested in the marine environment.
The World Topographic Map incorporates data provided by the GIS community via the Community Maps program.
This National Geographic basemap was developed by the National Geographic Society with content provided by the ArcGIS community.ArcGIS web maps go beyond what you see in a typical Internet map. They can include:
- Informational pop-up windows for its features
- Editing palettes
- A mechanism to run analysis and work with the results
- Tools for displaying and working with time-series information
- And much more
These and other capabilities are saved as part of each web map definition. They can be shared using web and mobile applications with anyone who has a web connection.
Creating useful, effective web maps
You can encapsulate rich GIS content and capabilities into web maps that you use to share your geographic information. A common starting point for good web maps is to mash up focused operational information with a good multiscale basemap (a basemap plus operational overlays).
You have a wide choice of built-in basemaps, including a detailed world topographic map, a National Geographic basemap, imagery and street maps, canvas basemaps that provide neutral backdrops for your data, a world oceans map, and others—all created in conjunction with, and incorporating authoritative information from the global GIS community. Custom basemaps can also be created, such as standardized city land parcel maps, geological maps, and so on.
Virtually any information can be displayed and accessed through these maps. They can include any data created and published by the GIS community, such as official data from government agencies around the world at the local, regional, national, and international level. These can be supplemented and overlaid with your own operational GIS data and with business data in a wide variety of formats, including KML, enterprise databases, tables, spreadsheets, CAD systems, geotagged photos and videos, live feeds from sensors, and so on. All of these can be symbolized and presented in a virtually unlimited number of ways tailored to the needs of your users, including fully customizable attribute pop-up windows. Plus your users themselves can mash up data from different maps and layer their own data on top to create and share new web maps.
Web maps can contain interactive tools such as attribute reports, data-driven symbology, dynamic graphs, time sliders, and intelligent template-based data collection. They can incorporate the results of geostatistics, geoprocessing, analytics, and predictive modeling. With these tools, people can use web maps to not only visualize data but also to reach through the map and actually get to the data and spatial modeling results for exploration, query, analysis, and problem solving.
There's an exploding demand for reliable information. The ability to synthesize diverse information and present it in a clear, effective way in a form that anyone can use makes ArcGIS web maps particularly compelling. The world is ready for your maps.
Many types of ArcGIS maps
There are a wide variety of different types of maps that you can create and put to work with ArcGIS. ArcGIS maps are powerful precisely because they can be used for specific tasks. Visit Types of ArcGIS maps to review a range of map types and how they are typically used.