By Mamata Akella, Esri Design Cartographer
The Mapping Center Team is pleased to announce some recent updates that have been incorporated into the World Topographic Map available on ArcGIS Online.
If you are not familiar with this online, multi-scale basemap, you might want to take a minute to read the Mapping Center blog post announcing it in July of 2009.
As mentioned in that blog, this basemap has been envisioned as a community-wide effort, and a community-wide effort it has been! Not only does the map use best available data from many public agencies, it also features large scale (1:9,000, 1:4000, 1:2,000, and 1:1,000) detailed maps using GIS data from a handful of cities.
We have been cycling through quarterly updates since the map was first released, adding more content each time. In our most recent update, we added detailed content for New York City, Washington DC, and Yosemite National Park. Some screenshots for these areas are shown below. In addition, other completed cities are:
- Portland, OR (data courtesy of Portland Metro)
- Philadelphia, PA (data courtesy of Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA))
- Pasadena, CA (data courtesy of City of Pasadena)
- Redlands, CA (data courtesy of City of Redlands, Department of Innovation and Technology, GIS Division)
New York City, NY (data courtesy of New York City Data Mine)
Northern portion of Central Park in New York City, NY at the scale of ~1:9,000.
Governors Island in New York City, NY at the scale of ~1:4000.
Washington, DC (data courtesy of District of Columbia Geographic Information System)
The area around Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC at the scale of ~1:9,000.
Dupont Circle area in Washington, DC at the scale of ~1:4,000.
Yosemite National Park, CA (data courtesy of Yosemite National Park Resource Management Division of the U.S. National Park Service)
Yosemite Valley area in Yosemite National Park, CA at the scale of ~1:9,000.
Half Dome area in Yosemite National Park, CA at the scale of ~1:4,000.
Where the data were available, we also spent some extra time making maps that feature particular areas of interest within a city. Screenshots of some of these are below.
The United States Capitol Building in Washington, DC at the scale of ~1:2,000.
Pasadena City College in Pasadena, CA at the scale of ~1:4,000.
The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA at the scale of ~1:2,000.
Esri’s main campus in Redlands, CA at the scale of ~1:4,000.
Ford Park in Redlands, CA at the scale of ~1:2,000.
If you are interested in creating large scale maps with similar cartography, you can download the Topographic Map Template — Large Scales from the template and tool gallery on the Community Maps Resource Center.
Also, if you work for a city that has detailed data, get in touch with us to see how you can participate in this community basemap initiative!
Special thanks to all of the cities who provided their data to us, and thanks also to the cartographers at Esri who put these maps together!
