{"id":3079,"date":"2021-06-02T16:20:26","date_gmt":"2021-06-02T04:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/?p=3079"},"modified":"2023-05-07T00:13:37","modified_gmt":"2023-05-07T00:13:37","slug":"map-services-for-the-masses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/map-services-for-the-masses\/","title":{"rendered":"Map Services for the Masses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here we look at adding web services to a map in Pro.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you live in Selwyn, it’s nice to know that you can go to the web and have a look at the district plan<\/a>\u00a0– local government in action.\u00a0 You can\u00a0go a step further and\u00a0look at the maps in their Eplan<\/a>\u00a0webmap:<\/p>\n

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Click on what you see on the map and you’ll get some more information in a window off to the side:<\/p>\n

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Handy, yes?\u00a0 Hopefully many of you would look this and think, hmmm, feels kinda like GIS.\u00a0 And you’d be right!\u00a0 These maps are coming off of ECan’s servers and have been let loose on the world for all to see.\u00a0 A number of people might look at this and also<\/em> say that there’s some useful stuff in here for my analysis.\u00a0 Wouldn’t it be nice to able to add this to my GIS map?\u00a0 Fear not – it’s relatively easy (once you know how) but it does come with a few very big caveats.\u00a0 First we’ll talk about how to get this on your map and then we’ll talk about the limitations.<\/p>\n

These maps are out in the world as web services<\/a> – essentially dumb images of GIS data that can be streamed over the web and used in browsers, much like what you see in Google Maps or Google Earth or just about any webmap you come across.\u00a0 What we need to know to add these to a map in Pro is their URL, or, more precisely, the URL of the server they live on.\u00a0 You’d be excused for not knowing this, but it is:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/gis.ecan.govt.nz\/arcgis\/rest\/services<\/a><\/p>\n

Being a URL, you could plug this into a browser and this is what you’ll see (go on…click on it, I dare\u00a0 you [it’s safe]):<\/p>\n

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Those folders hold details on different web services available.\u00a0 Basically, anything you see on Canterbury Maps is coming from here.\u00a0 Looking in the Selwyn_DC folder we see:<\/p>\n

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And there’s our district plan as a map service.\u00a0 Clicking on that<\/em>, we can see all the layers available in this service:<\/p>\n

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That’s a lotta stuff!\u00a0 As we’ll see in a bit, we can add all these at one time or as individual layers.\u00a0 Now let’s get these on a map.<\/p>\n

In Pro, go the Insert<\/span><\/strong> tab and look for Connections<\/strong><\/span>:\u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>.\u00a0 There are a lot of options available here:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To add these layers we want to choose “New ArcGIS Server” – there are other kinds of services that we need to choose those other options for but ECan uses an ArcGIS Server for their data so we’ll go with that.<\/p>\n

For the Server URL we can use the one up above – no need for a username and password:<\/p>\n

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When OK is clicked we get a new Servers folder and connection in the Catalog pane:<\/p>\n

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I can expand the connection and there are all the folders we saw in the browser above:<\/p>\n

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Any and all can be previewed in the Catalog View (these layers are\u00a0from\u00a0the Public folder):<\/p>\n

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Anything in these folders can be added to your map.\u00a0 We’ve been talking about the Selwyn District Plan thus far, so inside the Selwyn_DC folder is the plan and all its sublayers:<\/p>\n

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I could add individual sublayers but I’ll just add them all by dragging the top level SDC_DistrictPlan onto my map:<\/p>\n

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(I could also add this from the Map<\/span> <\/strong>tab > Add Data<\/span><\/strong> > Servers<\/span> <\/strong>> services on gis.ecan.govt.nz.ags)<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Once on the map, most of they layers are greyed out but as I zoom in they become visible – their visibility is tied to the scale of the map:<\/p>\n

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I can click on features and get pop up windows with more details.\u00a0 Handy, but wait, here come the caveats.<\/p>\n

As noted above, these are dumb images of GIS data – they come precooked with symbology that we can’t change, other than adjusting their transparency.<\/p>\n

We can’t access their attribute tables except though pop ups.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, we can’t use this layers for analysis – they can’t be used as inputs to tools.\u00a0 It is possible to set up layers so they can be used this way, but they have to be configured properly.\u00a0 They can also be set up to be edited by GIS users or people using webmaps.\u00a0 But not these ones.<\/p>\n

The best we can hope for on these is to use them as basemaps upon which we can digitise our own data.\u00a0 There’s a chance the data may be available on Canterbury Maps’ Open Data<\/a> site for download, but no guarantee.<\/p>\n

So, on the one hand, it’s great that we can add these layers onto our maps, but a bit of a bummer we can’t use them for analysis.\u00a0 Nonetheless, good on Selwyn District Council for making these available and double (nay, triple) good on ECan for making all this possible.\u00a0 Several other district plans are available through this URL plus a wide range of other interesting layers (e.g. the Public folder).\u00a0 Imagery can be had at\u00a0https:\/\/gisbasemap.ecan.govt.nz\/arcgis\/rest\/services<\/a>\u00a0– too many for me to show in one image:<\/p>\n

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Once you know where to look there are a lot of these services available.\u00a0 To finish this off, consider the basemaps built into ArcGIS that we change to show different background.\u00a0 These are web services themselves.\u00a0 If you want to see where they come from, go to:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/services.arcgisonline.co.nz\/ArcGIS\/rest\/services\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Each of the NZ specific basemaps can be found in one of those folders.\u00a0 For instance, the NZ Community Basemap is in the Generic folder:<\/p>\n

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To see it, click on the Generic\/newzealand link:<\/p>\n

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Lots of gobbeldy gook – but if you click on View In: ArcGIS Javascript<\/span><\/strong> you’ll see the basemap as we usually see it inside Pro:<\/p>\n

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(To be fair, I had to zoom out and pan to see this bit, but it’s there.)\u00a0 The global scale basemaps live on servers in California.<\/p>\n

There are a lot more technical details sitting underneath this and I’ve totally avoided talking about wonky things like REST endpoints<\/a>, but suffice it to say that there is a huge range of services like these that can be added to your maps, so long as 1) you know they’re out there, 2)\u00a0you’re happy to not be using them for analysis and 3) you know the URL they live at.\u00a0 But that’s a map service for another time.<\/p>\n

C<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here we look at adding web services to a map in Pro. If you live in Selwyn, it’s nice to know that you can go to the web and have a look at the district plan\u00a0– local government in action.\u00a0 You can\u00a0go a step further and\u00a0look at the maps in their Eplan\u00a0webmap: Click on what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3079"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3978,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079\/revisions\/3978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}