MAC URISA 2016

Spatially enabled data often has utility across organizations and the public, but not all are interested in the data's spatial relationships. There are unreached potential consumers of GIS data, who's interests lies in the business end of the data, but who cannot leverage the information outside of GIS-centric applications. The internet, RESTful APIs, open data formats, and open source map services such as Open Layers, Google Maps and Bing Maps are some technologies that the GIS community must embrace to more effectively reach non-traditional audiences. GIS Specialists should not be the only ones building applications based on data that contain "SHAPE" columns. Embracing REST in GIS will open doors to the data and allow skilled developers in other organizations to design their own custom solutions, yet maintain centralized GIS data goals. This discussion presents some advantages of open data and RESTful web APIs and some technologies that can be leveraged to implement such stragies.