So far, we’ve brought in web services from a few different servers in order to get a multidimensional picture of conditions around Mount Rainier. In many cases, you might want to add your own data to supplement whatever web services you find. Suppose you’re going to be hiking on a section of the Wonderland Trail, which encircles Mount Rainier. Let’s add this trail to our map by uploading a shapefile directly to our map in ArcGIS Online. This dataset was adapted from a file geodatabase feature class downloaded from the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office public download page [1].
The functionality to add a shapefile directly from a .zip file is not yet supported in the new (current) version of the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer, so to perform this function we need to temporarily switch back to the Map Viewer Classic.
Your data is saved inside the web map rather than being published as a regular, individual layer in your ArcGIS Online content. This works fine for small datasets that need to be used on a limited basis. However, there may be other situations where you want the data to be available to multiple web maps, or at multiple offices. In such a situation, you can publish the data as a service running directly on ArcGIS Online (with no ArcGIS Server needed). We will do this in the next section of the lesson.