Layers of all kinds can be found by searching the database using key terms like “rivers Colorado” or “population Arizona”. Other ArcGIS Online DataĪrcGIS Online data (also found in the File menu) is a good source for both raster and vector data. While Add Basemap File Menu ESRI has quite a lot of data on their ReST server that can be accessed through the Catalog window in ArcMap (not by default, by the way, so don’t go looking for it), the most used basemaps are available for use through the File menu in ArcMap. This data is often too large to download or may take up an unnecessarily large amount of your personal hard drive. Basically, a ReST server is a hard drive owned by someone else, in this case ESRI, where large amounts of data are stored and access is provided via the internet to those with authorization. While the hillshade is made from an analysis raster - a DEM - the actual hillshade is best used as a base layer.ĮSRI Add Basemap provides a series of streaming basemaps from the Representational State Transfer Server or a ReST server. One example we’ve looked at thus far is a hillshade layer.

Base data rasters are more like images than data sources, serving as a great background, but lacking the necessary data to digitize or perform raster analysis with. Often, you can use analysis rasters for both analysis and as a base data layer, however, it’s not likely and sometimes not a good idea to do the opposite - use a base data layer as an analysis. Raster data can be separated into two main groups: rasters to use as base data and rasters to use for analysis. This is far from an exhastive list of data, but it provides several of the major sites data can be found. The following sections show some examples of places to find and download geospatial and non-spatial data.

Okay, so now you know what makes quality data, where potential error lies, and how to check the metadata to find out the who, what, where, why, and how of a data set, but where do you find this quality data? In some cases, you will need to digitize some original data of your own, but in so many cases, you can download data for use in your project.

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