Finding Data on WeoGeo Market

 

WeoGeo empowers users to find data through web-based geographic search in real-time, from anywhere and everywhere. Find out how below.

This tutorial will walk you through the process of finding data on WeoGeo Market. In this tutorial, we will be looking for data about coastal habitats in Southern Florida.

To begin, go to market.weogeo.com. When you enter the Market website, you will see a map, centered on your current location (based on your IP address). I am in Portland, Oregon, so the map has centered itself over the Portland area, as shown in the image below. The location of the map will always adjust to your current location.

To find data, we will first navigate to our area of interest. There are two ways to do this. You can either use the cursor to drag the map to your area of interest or you can use the Location Search (highlighted in the image below) in the Search & Results panel to find your area of interest.

We will use the Location Search to navigate to our area of interest. The Location Search accepts cities, states, zip codes, place names, and map coordinates.

Since we are interested in data for the state of Florida, we will type “Florida” into the Location Search box. To proceed, click the small red arrow next to the Location Search box. As seen in the image below, the map is now centered over Florida.

However, we are interested in finding data for Southern Florida so we will use the zoom bar on the right side of the map (red circle in the image below) to zoom in to Southern Florida.

Notice that as we zoom in, the results in the Search & Results panel are updated to reflect the datasets available in the current geographic extent. This happens dynamically every time the map is moved or when any of the search parameters are changed.

Each result displayed in the Search & Results panel is represented by a shaded orange box in the MapView. This orange box shows the extent covered by the dataset.

If you hover your cursor over an individual dataset in the Search & Results panel, the corresponding extent of that individual listing will become highlighted by a thick white outline (shown in the image below).

The bottom left corner of the Search & Results panel shows us how many results we are viewing and also how many total results were found for our search (shown by a red circle in above image).

Text Search

Our search has delivered many results and we would like to further refine our results so we can find a dataset for Florida habitats. To do this, we will use the Text Search found at the top of the Search & Results panel.

We are looking for data about coastal habitats in Southern Florida, so we will search for the word “habitat”. As shown in the image below, the Search & Results panel now displays datasets that are within the current geographic extent shown in MapView and contain the word “habitat”.

Filtering Results

We can further refine our search by using the Filter option. Clicking the Filter button (circled in the image below) opens the Filter panel (shown below) which provides a variety of options to help you further refine your search.

We are going to use the Filter to limit our search results to vector data. To do this, we will use the Data Type filter. Click “Data Type” in the Filter panel. This shows two Data Type options: vector and raster. We are looking for vector data, so we will click the radio button next to the word “Vector” to apply the filter for vector data.

Our results now only show vector datasets that contain the keyword “Habitat” and fall within our geographic search area.

We are now done setting filters for our search. To hide the Filter panel click the X in upper right corner of the panel.

Once filters are set, all further searches will be constrained by these selections unless the filter is removed. To remove individual filters, click the red X that appears next to each filter value when filter constraints are set.

In the Search & Results panel, we now see a dataset called “Florida Marine Habitats.” Based on the title, I think this dataset will meet my needs. To learn more about the dataset, click on the listing. This opens the Data Description Box, a pop up window which contains a description and a thumbnail preview of the data and a button that gives you the option to view the data listing’s Details. Clicking on this button will bring you to a page where you can customize and order the data.

Learn more about customizing and ordering data, with our tutorial on Ordering Data from WeoGeo Market.

Additional Features

The WeoGeo Market has some additional tools to help you share datasets with others and keep track of new listings. The link tool allows users to share their WeoGeo Market searches with others and the RSS tool allows users to subscribe to an RSS feed that will update whenever new datasets are added or when changes are made to datasets within your search criteria (including your geographic area of interest).

The link tool allows users to easily share their WeoGeo Market search results with others. There are two link options.

  1. Permalink: The permalink contains all the parameters of your search and can be used to share your search results with others.
  2. Widget: The widget is a small version of the WeoGeo MapView page which contains all the parameters of your search. The widget link can be used to embed MapView results on a webpage.

RSS Feed

Like Permalink, the RSS feed link contains the search parameters of your most recent search. Opening this link in an RSS Feed Reader will give you updates to your search criteria (anything you have set in the Search & Results or Filter panels) within the geographic area shown in MapView. Your Feed Reader will be updated to any dataset added to the WeoGeo Market listings that match your search criteria.