Last week the British Geological Survey (BGS) launched a new web site – OpenGeoscience – a service where users can view maps and access a wide variety of other information. The use of ArcGIS Online basemaps, the same as available in ArcGIS Explorer, was covered in a recent ArcGIS Online blog post. The site features a nice Geology of Britain viewer that uses ArcGIS Online basemaps and JavaScript API.
The site also includes a KML and the shapefile data along with a layer file (.lyr). Here we’ve taken the KML and added it to Explorer, and used the Bing Streets as our basemap.
We also used the layer file (.lyr) and associated data in ArcGIS Explorer, and also created a layer package from them. Here’s the layer package.
The BGS site is a good example of publishing the same content in a variety of different ways, for public users via a Web app, KML, and also the building block data so it can be used and combined with other data for further GIS use.
