ArcGIS Open Data, released in July 2014, is a free website created from your organisation’s ArcGIS online account, which allows you to share your open data publically. Here at Esri UK we’ve created our own Esri UK Open Data site so you can see what it can do and also published some open data which you can use straight away!
My favourite feature about ArcGIS Open Data is how quickly you can get data into the site. All I had to do was share my feature services to an Open Data group. ArcGIS Open Data then transformed it so that it is available as a Spreadsheet, KML, Shapefile, GeoJSON or as a GeoService, without me having to do anymore work. This workflow also works with ArcGIS Server Services.
Through this method of sharing we have been able to include a number of datasets, available through open data licences, such as all the Ordnance Survey’s Open Boundaries and Environment Agency’s Risk of Flooding from Rivers and Sea dataset.
How do you start using ArcGIS Open Data?
If you’re an administrator of your organisation’s account all you need do to activate ArcGIS Open data is; log into your ArcGIS Online account, go to My Organization and click on Edit Settings. At the bottom of the tabs there is an Open Data tab, which gives the option to enable Open Data.
Once you’ve enabled Open Data capabilities you can create your website and customize it using the wizards or Bootstrap (a free and open-source framework) before making it public. You will also be able to create Open Data groups in your ArcGIS Online account which you can share data to. This means you can control what data appears on your Open Data site. Please follow the hyperlinks for more on how to create an open data site and best practice workflows.
To see more ArcGIS Open Data sites and the adoption since its release, please see the 2014 review here. This also features the City of York’s open data site.