3D Visualization & Analytics

GIS is Social: Web GIS is the GIS of the world

Discover ways to increase the visibility of your GIS work in Chapter 10 of The ArcGIS Book

Modern GIS is about participation, sharing, and collaboration. GIS professionals help people in organizations big and small make better decisions, reduce costs, work more effectively, communicate better, and gain key insights. The final chapter in The ArcGIS Book seeks to inspire GIS professionals to be active participants and improve the quality, accuracy, and efficiency of the work being done in their domain.

The worldwide GIS community is extending the reach of this technology, and it all starts with the work you do on your professional GIS desktop. You compile and manage geographic data, work with advanced maps, perform spatial analysis, and conduct GIS projects. Your work can be shared as online maps and apps that bring GIS to life for users within your organization and beyond.

A key component in your organizational GIS is your content catalog, or portal. This catalog contains all the items that are created and shared by your group’s users. Items can be maps, layers, analytical models, and apps.

“What’s interesting about geographic data is that it’s all about layers. So there’s this global collection of information that’s been assembled and continues to be kept current and further built out by the GIS user community,” says Clint Brown, Esri Director of Software Products and the thought leader in this chapter. “All of us need access to other people’s data to do our jobs and to do them well.”

GIS was actually about open data long before the term became fashionable, because GIS practitioners were always looking for ways to deepen and broaden their own GIS data holdings. No single agency, team, or individual user could possibly hope to compile all the themes and geographic extents of data required, so people networked to get what they needed.

In addition to encouraging networking and information sharing, this chapter puts out the call for GIS professionals to engage with their local communities. Many examples of how geography and maps facilitate civic engagement are provided.

Teachers can engage students in learning and applying ArcGIS using The ArcGIS Book and the exercises it contains.

The Quickstart in chapter 10 helps you get started using The ArcGIS Book and the lessons it contains by guiding you through the process to activate ArcGIS trial software and set up your ArcGIS organization.

Extend the reach of GIS and continue to shed light on the work you do. Dive into The ArcGIS Book today.

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