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
editFor 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:
- Note the
OBJECTID_1value in the popup. Every layer has a unique key column, such asOBJECTIDorOBJECTID_1, that assigns a unique numeric value to each feature in the layer. - Click on "View Full Details" to visit an overview page about the dataset.
- Click on "View Data Source" to visit the layer's metadata page on the ArcGIS server's REST endpoint.
- At the bottom of the page, click on "Query" to open the layer's query tool.
- 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
1=1. In this case, I'm only interested in the Taylor Street Urban Interchange, so I'll set "Where" toOBJECTID_1=4877, the value I noted in step 1. To get all the attributes about the returned feature, set "Out Fields" to*. - 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.