Tag: Open Data

ArcGIS Hub: Grow Your Local Economy

Last year, Esri announced a new product in their platform– ArcGIS Hub. ArcGIS Hub supports collaboration between governments, businesses, citizens and their communities to accomplish data-driven Initiatives.

Recently, Blue Raster assisted Esri in the creation of the Grow Your Local Economy Initiative. This Initiative provides a suite of tools and applications you can use to show business owners, developers, and entrepreneurs why your city is the ideal place to attract top industry talent and grow their business. You can then show and monitor the progress your community is making towards growing your local economy.

The Grow Your Local Economy Initiative consists of four main tools:ArcGIS Hub Icon

  1. Business Development Website – Features the economic development initiative. Users can embed the Economic Development Explorer & Storymap to fuel interest in their area
  2. Economic Development Explorer – This premium interactive application gives potential businesses and developers an easy way to explore aspects of the area.
  3. Why Locate to Your Community Story Map – This configurable story map template highlights why your city is the ideal place to attract top talent.
  4. Survey capabilities – Gain input from current or potential business owners, developers, and entrepreneurs.

Economic Development Explorer

Get inspired by this example of Washington D.C.’s initiative below, and learn more about Blue Raster’s ArcGIS Hub work and support packages.

ArcGIS Hub Grow Your Local Economy

 

 

Unlocking Data With WRI Open Data Portal

Blue Raster is excited to announce the release of the World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Open Data Portal. indonesia_archive_firesBuilt with the open source platform CKAN, the Portal provides a centralized, searchable catalog of all data provided by WRI.

Historically, WRI projects published data online to the WRI website. But their site contained data from only a fraction of their projects and none of their international offices. The new data portal provides for the first time a full catalog of WRI datasets, including those not previously publicly available or searchable. Internally, the Portal is also providing a more streamlined process for uploading and hosting data, so that it is simpler for WRI staff to get data online and properly documented.

 

As part of the project, Blue Raster built a custom workflow to pull existing WRI datasets from ArcGIS Online into the Portal, including items from Global Forest Watch’s (GFW) Open Data site. Through a harvesting process, the Portal fetches and imports records along with each item’s metadata and tags. This enables WRI projects using ArcGIS Online to continue their existing workflows for publishing and managing data. Any changes made to data items in ArcGIS Online are automatically reflected in the Portal, allowing for easy data and documentation management.

Global Forest Watch Open Data

Because enabling users to more easily find and download WRI.org content was also a key goal of the project, Blue Raster designed the Portal with a powerful search and discovery engine. The data portal supports dataset keyword searches, accompanied by tagging to allow further categorization, and the ability to discover related datasets and content.

Check out WRI’s Open Data Portal, and see how it is helping turn WRI’s data from information into action.

 


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