A new online map viewer makes it easy to browse free map galleries and hook into several public map databases.
The viewer from Esri allows you to hook into public ArcGIS servers.
From within your browser, you can paste a URL into a box and see all the maps available on the map server. Unfortunately, viewing maps with a lot of data doesn't work so well, but that's to be expected from any browser-based interface.
Take the California Natural Resources Agency, for example. They have a map server that easily hooks into the ArcGIS online viewer. I loaded up the tsunami risk, county boundaries and California base maps without a problem. The transparency adjustment worked quickly and allowed me to see the overlaps. The search box in the right corner quickly took me wherever I wanted to go around the state.
Besides viewing maps, the explorer tool allows you to create and share maps, too. Take a look at this map presentation of disk golf locations in San Diego.
ArcGIS online does require Microsoft Silverlight, so you'll have to install that for it to work on your Mac or Windows computer. Right now, I don't know of any way to run Silverlight apps on a Linux system like Ubuntu.
Comments
via Twitter