Audience: GIS professionals tasked with the sharing and presentation of spatial data, both internally and to the public, interested in creating customized user experiences without having to learn computer programming.
Description: Apps are a very effective way to bring GIS data, cartography and analysis products to the people that need them. Apps, whether viewed in a browser or installed on a device, meet users where they are and can be tailor made to a user community’s technical skill level and GIS experience. They offer focused experiences that allow the cartographic presentation, analysis tasks or workflows designed by geospatial professionals to take center stage. However, the traditional barrier to the widespread prevalence of apps for content access has been the need to do custom programming (e.g., ESRI Javascript API). Not all GIS professionals specialize in programming, but most all GIS professionals can benefit from the use of apps as a data dissemination tool. As GIS technology has evolved, new ways of packaging geospatial information products within the context of apps have emerged: it is now possible for a GIS professional with no programming experience to use configurable templates and application builders to create basic, but highly effective, geospatial web applications in a matter of minutes. Template based GIS data viewers are not a fundamentally new concept (e.g., ESRI FlexViewer); however, the relative ease at which the WebGIS pattern, as realized in ArcGIS Online, enables users to build and deploy applications is a real game-changer for meeting the needs of commonly encountered use cases for map sharing. This session will briefly review the WebGIS pattern generally, then focus on the application development functionality included in ArcGIS Online. By the end of the webinar, users with an existing ArcGIS Online organization should be comfortable deploying basic web applications using WebApp Builder and ESRI’s configurable templates.
An Agency of the Commonwealth of Virginia
