{"id":67161,"date":"2015-04-07T09:58:22","date_gmt":"2015-04-07T09:58:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/product\/uncategorized\/introduction-to-the-living-atlas-community\/"},"modified":"2018-03-26T21:05:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-26T21:05:00","slug":"introduction-to-the-living-atlas-community","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/imagery\/imagery\/introduction-to-the-living-atlas-community","title":{"rendered":"Introduction to the Living Atlas Community"},"author":6281,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_searchwp_excluded":""},"categories":[22931,22941],"tags":[22981,40161],"industry":[],"product":[36581,36551],"class_list":["post-67161","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-imagery","category-mapping","tag-community-maps","tag-living-atlas-of-the-world","product-arcgis-living-atlas","product-arcgis-online"],"acf":{"short_description":"The Living Atlas of the World is a rapidly growing part of the ArcGIS Platform, providing users with easy access to a rich set of high-qu...","flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

The Living Atlas of the World is a rapidly growing part of the ArcGIS Platform, providing users with easy access to a rich set of high-quality, ready-to-use content published by Esri and the ArcGIS user community. With this newsletter and related resources, we would like to inspire and empower you to become an active participant in our worldwide Living Atlas Community.<\/p>\n

Background<\/h2>\n

For several years, ArcGIS Online has provided users with access to ready-to-use content that could be used to publish and share maps and applications. This began with a small set of basemaps, and other foundational services such as geocoding and routing, which were quickly adopted by ArcGIS users. To enhance the quality and coverage of these services, many of these ArcGIS users offered to share their geographic data with Esri to integrate into the maps and make available to all users. As a result, the Community Maps program was born! This community initiative, along with the growth of ArcGIS Online and web mapping generally, has led to significant increases in the usage of these basemaps each year.<\/p>\n

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Over the past few years, Esri has also been expanding the types of maps and layers that it makes available to ArcGIS users. These maps have covered a wide range of topics related to people (i.e., human systems), earth (i.e., physical systems), and life (i.e., natural systems). This has included multispectral imagery, demographic maps, elevation layers, ecological land units, and much more. The intent of these maps and layers is to provide a diverse and useful set of ready-to-use content that can support a wide range of maps, applications, and geographic analysis.<\/p>\n

Living Atlas Community<\/h2>\n

ArcGIS Online currently includes about 1 million items that are publicly available to all users, with the vast majority being web maps, map layers, or web mapping applications (e.g., story maps). Many of these items reference geographic information, published by authoritative sources, which would be useful to many users. However, given the volume of information in the system, much of this information can be difficult for those users to discover and access. One of the primary goals of the Living Atlas is to make the best of this information easy to discover and access.<\/p>\n

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Gallery of Featured Content from the Living Atlas of the World<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Living Atlas Community consists of two types of participants:<\/p>\n