User:Mxn/Citing a feature in an ArcGIS map

Many online interactive maps published by U.S. federal, state, and local GIS departments are powered by ArcGIS Online. When using an ArcGIS map as a source regarding a particular feature visible on the map, you can cite a permalink associated with that feature instead of forcing the reader to interact with the map themselves.

Example
For this example, we'll use "State Highway Bridges", a dataset published by the California Department of Transportation that indicates the location and various attributes of every Caltrans-maintained bridge in the state. I would like to cite this map for a statement that the Taylor Street Urban Interchange was built in 2003 to carry Taylor Street over California State Route 87. I could link to this location in the interactive viewer, but it would be up to the reader to click on the correct point to see the cited information in a popup. Instead, I'll link to a page that ArcGIS generates about the specific point feature representing the bridge:


 * 1) Note the   value in the popup. Every layer has a unique key column, such as   or , that assigns a unique numeric value to each feature in the layer.
 * 2) Click on "View Full Details" to visit an overview page about the dataset.
 * 3) Click on "View Data Source" to visit the layer's metadata page on the ArcGIS server's REST endpoint.
 * 4) At the bottom of the page, click on "Query" to open the layer's query tool.
 * 5) By default, this query tool displays a form that allows you to build a SQL query. To get all the features in the layer, you can set "Where" to  . In this case, I'm only interested in the Taylor Street Urban Interchange, so I'll set "Where" to , the value I noted in step 1. To get all the attributes about the returned feature, set "Out Fields" to.
 * 6) At this point, I could link to the query results by the current URL, but click on "4877" to open the individual feature's page.

You can cite this page directly using cite web. However, considering that it's an integral part of a map, it may make sense to instead use cite map.

Depending on the dataset, some fields are a bit cryptic, because this page displays their raw, machine-readable values rather than their human-readable labels. Some datasets let you click on "HTML Popup" to open a pretty-printed version of this page that matches what you saw in the popup in step 1.