The monthly Moments of Zen blog series is brought to you by the ArcGIS Living Atlas team. Throughout the series, we will highlight different elements of the latest guidance for your Living Atlas items. Working with unfamiliar layers and maps can be a challenge when basic information is unavailable. Taking care of the small but important details and maintenance on your items helps to increase moments of calmness (or at least, decrease moments of panic) for item users downstream.

Living Atlas releases two or three updates to its Item Detail Guidance per year, around the same time as ArcGIS Online releases. This guidance shares the best practices and recommendations for content (layers, maps, apps, tools) that their creators share in Living Atlas.

This month’s moment of Zen is all about field aliases.

Understanding fields

But first, let’s learn about fields.

Some items, like web maps and layers, have underlying attribute data, like city, site code, and occupancy. Attribute data is organized in a table, typically with each column representing a field and each row representing a feature. Each field contains attribute data about a topic.

Within these tables, each field has a name, a field alias, a field description, and a field value type. When these metadata are filled out, a human user or AI assistant can understand what that field contains.

ArcGIS Living Atlas provides item-specific guidance for fields.

• Field aliases (also known as display names)
• Field descriptions
• Field value types

A moment of Zen: Edit the field alias

Now let’s look at field aliases, specifically.

By default, most layers auto-populate the field alias using the field names. You might think that the auto-populated text is “good enough” but having a field alias that is identical to the field name is harder for users to interpret. By providing a field alias that is different from the field name, you clarify what the field contains and boost the usability of your item.

For example, look at these transformations:

In these transformation examples, each edited field alias uses title case instead of all caps. Words have spaces between them, and each word is fully spelled out. Prepositions—or connecting words, like “of”—are added for comprehension.

This is valuable to both humans who read these field aliases, and code or AI workflows where a human prompt like “Find the layer with number of stories in the data.”

With the “COUNTRY” example, the edited field alias provides greater specificity that the field is the country’s name, not an abbreviation or code. With this additional metadata, users do not have to search for that information in supporting documents.

Other immediate benefits to having field aliases include:

• Field aliases appear in your map’s legend and chart axes.
• Field aliases appear in your pop-up’s default fields list.
• Field aliases appear in the attribute drop-down list.
• Field aliases are preserved when exporting to a .gdb (geodatabase file).

It may seem minor, but taking the time to edit field aliases is a great way to help your users in ways they did not know they needed. That’s the moment of Zen.

Resources

To continue your Living Atlas journey, visit the following resources:

• Living Atlas product overview page
• Living Atlas blog article collection
• Living Atlas video channel
• Living Atlas on Esri Community
• Living Atlas login page
• Email Living Atlas Curators

Stay tuned for next month’s moment of Zen!