The Need of a Good Basemap

I found this blog post on basemaps over at the 41Latitude blog (if you aren’t following this blog you need to start right now) to resonate with me.

perhaps, in trying to make a basemap that’s optimized for everything, we’re actually creating one that’s optimized for nothing.

We all see it quite a bit these days.  Some data overlaid on a default Google Map and you can’t read a darn thing.  Working for the GNOCDC, we picked the Terrain map as our basemap (even though there is no “terrain” in NOLA) because it was the least cluttered basemap.

gnocdc-terrain.jpg

Over in the ESRI world, I’ve had a couple people ask me to put their data on the Esri Topographic web map servicebecause it looks so good.  Now I do agree, it is a beautiful basemap, but it isn’t one that lends itself to being a basemap.  Esri should be offering a muted basemap and allow for the most important part of the data, the information being overlaid, to stand out.

Building your own ArcGIS.com client

ArcGIS.com provides a great collection of resources and, as Jack explains below, allows other people to discover the work ESRI users are doing.

ArcGIS.com includes a cool website, but as we learned when developing the Geoportal Extension, it also provides a RESTful interface. This meant we could offer users of the Geoportal Extension access to the information others are sharing through ArcGIS.com.

In the Geoportal Extension we allow distributed searches to go to ArcGIS.com. We implemented this early on in our contribution to the Group on Earth Observation

Realizing that many organizations aren’t waiting for yet another portal, we developed a simple mechanism to integrate a search widget into any web page that would allow searching Geoportals. This has resulted in an HTML widget that can be embedded with 2 simple lines of HTML. By default this widget searches the Geoportal it is part of. But hold on, there’s more!

The Geoportal can search external catalogs, including ones that implement the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Catalog Service for the Web (CS-W), but since 9.3.1 it can also search… ArcGIS.com! Try it at the GEO Portal by going to the search page and selecting ArcGIS.com from the ‘search in’ dialog. You’ll notice it searches ArcGIS.com with the keywords you give. This means any Geoportal 9.3.1+ is a client to ArcGIS.com.

But back to the widget.

Directing the searches from the widget to ArcGIS.com is possible by adding a parameter that instructs the Geoportal to direct the searches to the identified remote site. And thus here is a widget that searches ArcGIS.com. All it took was a minimal HTML like this:

<html>
<body>
<p>Search widget for ArcGIS.com >
<script type="text/javascript"