What do you think of the Local Government Basemaps solution?

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03-17-2017 10:10 AM
HeatherEisan
Esri Contributor

Later this year we will be updating the Local Government Basemaps solution and leverage new capabilities in ArcGIS Pro, such as tasks and the ability to publish vector basemaps. Before we begin updating this solution and we want your feedback! What Local Government Basemap have you published? (feel free to share) What is your favorite basemap?  Are their specific design changes you would like us to make to an existing basemap?

12 Replies
DavidBuehler
Occasional Contributor III

I build my own base maps.  I am not a fan of the web mercator auxiliary sphere.  We prefer our local projection.  When I do use an ESRI base map, I tend to use the aerials, as those are the most useful for us, but tend to lack the resolution we need for most our projects.

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HeatherEisan
Esri Contributor

Thanks for your feedback, David.

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AlisonGaiser1
Occasional Contributor

We have also created our own bassemap, but it is based on the original general pupose local basemap. We do get push back on this map as it does not have a high colour contrast, which is required as we work towards WCAG compliance. Clients tend to want to use open street map because of this. 

On another note, I just downloaded all the basemaps at the link above but the GeneralPurpose.mxd has been saved at a version higher than 10.3.1 so I am unable to open it. Would it be possible to lower the version on that .mxd?

Thanks,

    Alison

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HeatherEisan
Esri Contributor

Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciated it. How do you make operational layers standout against a high color contrast map? I would be interested to look at one if you can share it.

I will take a look at the GeneralPurpose.mxd. You should be able to open it up in ArcGIS 10.3. Its supported on ArcMap versions 10.3 - 10.5.

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HeatherEisan
Esri Contributor

I fixed the Local Government Basemap download so all mxd's will open in ArcMap 10.3.

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SallieVaughn
Occasional Contributor

I have used the General Purpose and Imagery Reference Overlay maps and have found them helpful as a starting point for a lot of maps and applications we've created. We did have to make some modifications though to work with our data. For these details, some sort of documentation would have been nice.

  • Symbology on the streams/lakes layers included a special class for labeling the DuPage River. We had to modify that to work with our data since we don't have a DuPage River. Finding those little details required that I look at each label class SQL query which was a bit infuriating.
  • We also had to tweak the definition queries to use different feature areas for displaying certain features at certain levels of zoom.
  • Basemaps were created on a file GDB. We run SQL Server with ESRI Binary Data type... others are using one of the Microsoft data types. Each of those back-end database options changes the name of the fields that auto-calculate distance and area. Once re-pathed to our data, the downloaded basemaps wouldn't render any features with a definition query on area or a labeling query on area. I was able to find a script to help me out, but perhaps having different versions for different database back-ends would be nice -- or a least a note somewhere telling you about it and linking to the script or an X-Ray tool, perhaps?

These base maps have been a great way to provide visual consistency between our printed and digital products and have decreased the amount of time it takes for us to make custom maps. However, I have had some sort of operational issues with them. For example, both the general purpose and imagery reference basemaps include parcels and roads. For our particular organization, those data layers change on a daily basis. That would force us to recreate caches daily in order to keep our web applications up to date with actual feature geometry. That method just isn't sustainable or recommended. Also, the suggestion to use "Best" for Anti-Aliasing when publishing a basemap is in direct opposition to what your Server team recommends, especially if the cache needs to be rebuilt (Accelerating map cache creation—Documentation (10.3 and 10.3.1) | ArcGIS for Server). It might be a good idea to run a full implementation of one of these base maps from download to web application and involve members of each of the involved teams in the implementation to replicate their use by local governments.

HeatherEisan
Esri Contributor

Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it. I will look into the DuPage River label and server settings.

Did you use the Set Map Data Sources Python script tool (Set map data sources - Local Government Information Model | ArcGIS for Local Government) to help with resourcing data layers from a File Geodatabase to a SQL Server database?

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JoshuaYoung
New Contributor III

We published and use the General Purpose and Imagery Reference Overlay. We have really like the color schemes of those basemaps. 

The biggest issues with the General Purpose was the readability of the labels, the lack of repeating road names, and difficultly seeing where the city limits end. The labels are a little difficult to read in vector format and they become even more difficult to read once the basemap is rasterized. The lack of repeating road labels made you pan around the map at certain scales to find the name of a road that you were looking at. The transition from "in the city" to "out of the city" is hard to see on some monitors. It would be nice to add a dashed line to clarify the point of transition.

The main things that we changed for the Imagery Reference Overlay were making the road labels repeat, increasing the transparency of the road lines, and enabled symbol levels on the road lines.

We also looked at using Mobile Day, Mobile Night, Public Safety, and Zoning. However, we ended up not using any of them. The Mobile Day and Mobile Night were too difficult to read once rasterized. Our map service for Public Safety would not work properly in our police and fire departments systems and they ended up continuing to use the Esri Streets basemap. The Zoning basemap's road labels were too difficult to read and our users preferred having zoning as an operational layer instead of a basemap.

Going forward, I am trying to convince city administration to allow us to participate in the Community Maps Program so we can just leverage Esri's basemaps but still see our data. I like the symbology of Esri's vector basemaps. The only thing that is missing are address labels, but we can always overlay those ourselves for our maps. I should add that we will not be moving to vector basemaps until they support exporting/printing across most of platform.

HeatherEisan
Esri Contributor

Thank you for your feedback, I really appreciate it. I'm not sure if you have, but you can modify the road label placement if the placement in the GeneralPurpose.mxd and ImageryReferenceOverlay.mxd doesn't satisfy your needs. As for the labels being difficult to read once rasterized, I'll have to look into that. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I'll also look in to making the municipal/city boundary more visible (if I'm understanding you correctly) in the GeneralPurpose.mxd, as well as possibly adjusting the road transparency in the ImageryReferenceOverlay.mxd.

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