ESRI Tile Support in GeoCommons for More GeoLove!!!

Part of our vision for GeoCommons from it’s inception was connecting the world of GIS to a larger audience. Allowing data from the world of GIS to co-mingle with end-user data – empowering a new market to make their own maps and answer new questions. There is such a rich history of GIS with decades of fabulous data. How can we increase accessibility to the content and allow it to be remixed and reused?

Today we are excited to add one more brick to connecting the two worlds together. Geocommons and GeoIQ now both support ESRI tiles. Adding the data is super simple. Just grab the URL for the tile – in ArcGIS.com this is available at the bottom of each metadata page:

Copy and paste the URL into GeoCommons and then just append /tile/{Z}/{Y}/{X} to the end of the URL and click upload. In the case of the beautiful ESRI community basemap in the image above your URL would look like – http://services.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Topo_Map/MapServer/tile/{Z}/{Y}/{X}.

#maker_map_50543 {width: 100%; height: 400px;}

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maker_map_50543 = new F1.Maker.Map({map_id: “50543″, dom_id: “maker_map_50543″});

Your ESRI tiles will now be available as a layer in GeoCommons which you can remix with any of the other data in the platform. In this case I added photovoltaic installs in Colorado. If you are loading data from ArcGIS.com be sure to include the licensing terms in your metadata. Most of the data is CCbySA so include the following – “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License”. We are excited to see the maps the community creates interconnecting all the great daat being created across the spectrum.