WE'RE ADDING MORE ZOOM LEVELS TO THE NEW ZEALAND BASEMAPS (AND MAKING SOME CHANGES)

9 Dec, 2019
basemaps
content

WE'RE ADDING MORE ZOOM LEVELS TO THE NEW ZEALAND BASEMAPS (AND MAKING SOME CHANGES)

9 Dec, 2019
basemaps
content

Please Note that this change has been postponed until later this year, please watch this space for more updates. The New Basemap Schema described below is availabe in the meantime on the following URL for testing purposes:

https://services1.arcgisonline.co.nz/arcgis/rest/services/

Beneath every engaging WebMap, lies an unsung hero: a Basemap providing a background of geographic context for all of the content in your maps...

Eagle Technology offers a range of Basemaps in the New Zealand Transverse Mercator (NZTM) Projection that you can choose from when you create a new map. These Basemaps are used by hundreds of organisations across NZ, with the most popular of the bunch being the New Zealand Imagery Basemap, one which is updated regularly with the latest publicly-owned aerial imagery. Over the years, we have seen the usage of our Basemaps grow, and in those years, the requirements of our users have changed. That is why we’ll be making some changes to our existing Basemaps.

As part of its definition, every Basemap has rules to say how far you can zoom in and out in most of the apps and over the years we have received requests to allow for more zoom levels to support different use cases.  A couple of years ago we have added more zoom levels to our imagery Basemap, which now zooms in to 1:282. 

At 4pm this Wednesday 18/12/19 we will be expanding the zoom levels even further for all our Basemaps. We will add levels to the smaller scales (to allow you zoom further out beyond NZ coastlines) and more importantly add new zoom levels to the larger scales (for zooming right in). The smallest scale will be 1: 591,657,527 and the largest scale will be 1:70. For the new larger scale zoom levels we will be using a technique called resampling, that means you’re basically zooming into the image of a smaller scale. This means that for those levels, the map will not look as crisp, but it does allow you to zoom in when you need to (such as to look at detailed feature layers which lie on top of the Basemap).

For almost all the maps and apps this will be a smooth transition. After you reopen ArcGIS Pro or ArcMap or refresh the web page, you’ll be able to make use of the new zoom levels. There are a few to things to be aware of:

  • In ArcMap you may need to refresh your local display cache if you don’t see the Basemap showing up. Here you can read how to do that.
  • If you have your own cached maps, that uses the same zoom levels as one of our Basemaps and you have overlaid that map with one of our Basemaps current zoom levels they will still work in almost all the apps except for 3D web scenes. If you want to overlay you own maps with our Basemaps in the 3D scene viewer please re-cache your maps using the new tiling scheme, that can be found here
  • If you have a web application which explicitly requests a specific tile level e.g. tile level 0 then this may now result in a you initially viewing a different extent (i.e. zoomed out much further). This can be addressed by changing the requested zoom level to be 5 levels higher than previously e.g. zoom level 1 becomes zoom level 6. NB for a finite period of 3 months, we will have the old basemaps available on a different URL. Please contact gissupport@eagle.co.nz for more information.

Please note that separate to the zoom level changes, we have found that some users still use a very old URL to access our Basemaps. In order to ensure a high quality ongoing delivery of our Basemap services, and to aid with the transition, we will be turning that URL off. If you still use that URL, please switch to the official URL as per below:

As stated, we don’t expect any down time apart of these changes, but some minor disruptions may occur. If you have any questions about the upcoming change, please get in touch with us on livingatlas@eagle.co.nz.

References

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