Web App to Provide Quick Scale Comparison Data

Perth, Australia joins ESRI's Urban Observatory network, a web application used to make quick scale comparison data maps of participating cities.

1 minute read

June 20, 2014, 2:00 PM PDT

By Helen Brown


Kelly Ng reports on the latest city, Perth, Australia, to join ESRI's Urban Observatory network. Urban Observatory is a cloud-based GIS service where "Users can position the maps of any three cities side by side in a common scale and compare data such as population density, traffic, open space, urban footprint, and more," writes Ng. Currently the Urban Observatory website allows users to create interactive data maps of 30 cities including London, New York, and Tokyo.

The Urban Observatory web-based application does not allow the control of a full-fledged GIS application such as ArcGIS, but it does provide a much faster, quick look at comparisons of development patterns, demographic, and cultural information across major cities.

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