Skip to main content

Essential vocabulary

The following terms are used in ArcGIS Maps for Fabric. For more Esri and GIS terminology, see the Esri GIS dictionary.

ArcGIS

The brand name for Esri GIS products. ArcGIS includes a suite of apps and tools that work together to provide an online infrastructure for analyzing data, making maps, and sharing geographic information throughout an organization, across a community, and on the web.

With ArcGIS Maps for Fabric, you can combine your business data with data from your ArcGIS organizational account to create detailed maps that help you analyze the data visually and make better decisions.

ArcGIS for Microsoft Fabric

This is an umbrella term for a suite of products that bring Esri’s analysis and mapping capabilities to the Microsoft Fabric environment, providing location intelligence, visualization, and spatial analytics within the unified data and analytics environment provided by Fabric. These products include the following:

  • ArcGIS for Power BI

  • ArcGIS GeoAnalytics for Microsoft Fabric

  • ArcGIS Maps for Microsoft Fabric

Learn more about ArcGIS for Microsoft Fabric.

ArcGIS for Power BI

A custom data visualization in Microsoft Power BI. This visualization allows users to add maps to their dashboards and reports to view the spatial distribution of their data while also understanding the relationships between relevant variables in the other graphical visualizations available in Power BI.

ArcGIS Maps for Fabric

An interactive mapping and spatial data exploration workload within Microsoft Fabric. ArcGIS Maps for Fabric allows users to visualize data within the Microsoft Fabric environment using interactive maps to support spatially informed decisions.

ArcGIS GeoAnalytics for Microsoft Fabric

An Apache Spark library providing spatial analytics inside the data science and data engineering workloads in Microsoft Fabric. The library allows users to apply spatial functions and tools to advance data science workflows with their data in OneLake. Users can then view the results in other Fabric workloads, Microsoft 365 apps, and ArcGIS.

ArcGIS web map

A file format used to save your map to the Microsoft Fabric environment.

Attributes

Fields and values for a single feature or nonspatial record. Attributes contain the information and data about geographic features, such as the age of a building, its height or property value. Attributes are typically stored in a table, database, or service, such as a feature service. They are used to classify and filter data in data-driven visualizations.

Basemap

A layer that provides a geographical context, or background, for the content you want to display in a map. Esri maintains an extensive collection of basemaps that can be used as the backdrop for your content. Basemaps are designed to feature different kinds of content. For example, basemaps can show natural features like rivers and lakes, or roads, highways, and cities. It is best to choose a basemap that supports your content visually and provides geographic context.

Clustering

The function of organizing point features that are within a certain distance of each other into a single symbol to view and understand a map containing many data points. This tool makes it easier to identify patterns in high-density datasets with many points. Clustering is different from grouping, in which features are grouped by a user-specified category and styled accordingly.

Comma-separated values (CSV)

A type of delimited text file that uses commas or other characters to separate fields. CSV data can contain spatial data as numbers (for example, longitude and latitude). CSV data are one of the file types that can be imported into ArcGIS Maps for Fabric from your lakehouse.

Coordinate system

A geographic reference framework that consists of points, lines, or surfaces, and a set of rules used to define real-world locations.

A geographic coordinate system is used to find locations on a globe or sphere. World Geodetic Survey 1984 (WGS84) is a common geographic coordinate system in which every location on the Earth is specified by a set of numbers (coordinates). Coordinates are often expressed as latitude and longitude values.

A projected coordinate system is used to translate locations on a globe to locations on a flat surface, such as a monitor or paper map. Web Mercator is a common projected coordinate system in which locations are identified by x,y coordinates on a grid, with the origin at the center of the grid. Coordinate values in the Web Mercator system generally have six, seven, or eight digits to the left of the decimal, and the units are meters. If you are unsure which coordinate system to use, contact the originator of the data or the person who collected it.

Coordinates

Coordinates are used to represent locations in space relative to other locations. Coordinates are often shown in latitude-longitude pairs in which x-coordinates range from -180 to 180 and y-coordinates range from -90 to 90, or as values with six, seven, or eight digits to the left of the decimal point. When using ArcGIS Maps for Fabric, these value pairs are often composed of the values from two columns in the data.

Data lake

A centralized data repository containing a variety of data. OneLake is the data lake for Microsoft Fabric. An organization’s data lake contains the workspaces and lakehouses where ArcGIS Maps for Fabric accesses data.

Feature

The term geographic feature is typically shortened to feature in ArcGIS Maps for Fabric. Geographic features are representations of things located on or near the surface of the Earth. Geographic features can occur naturally (such as rivers and vegetation), can be construction items (such as roads, pipelines, wells, and buildings), and can be subdivisions of land (such as cities, boundaries, or land parcels). Geographic features are most commonly represented on a map as points, lines, or polygons. In ArcGIS Maps for Fabric, data you add to a map is represented as geographic features.

GeoJSON

An open standard geospatial data interchange format that represents simple geographic features and their non-spatial attributes. Based on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), GeoJSON is a format for encoding a variety of geographic data structures. It uses a geographic coordinate reference system, World Geodetic System 1984, and units of decimal degrees. To learn more about GeoJSON, see the GeoJSON specification.

GIS

GIS stands for geographic information systems or geographic information science. It is both the tools and the practice of mapping and interpreting location data. GIS brings data together with the spatial information that allows us to situate that data within landscapes or across the globe. GIS enables us to visualize patterns in our data across landscapes and time, and to understand how those patterns relate to other datasets or reference landmarks.

Grouping

The process of placing features in user-specified categories and styling them accordingly. Grouping reduces the granularity of raw data, allowing the viewer to interpret patterns in the data more easily. Some examples include age cohorts (0-10, 11-20, etc) or fire risk zones (low, medium, high).

Lakehouse

A flexible data architecture platform for storing, managing, and analyzing structured and unstructured data in a single location. In Fabric, multiple lakehouses can connect to OneLake, each connecting a variety of data types from different sources using unique data architecture rules and management tools that are customized to specific analysis workflows. It connects a variety of data types from different sources using data architecture and management tools. ArcGIS Maps for Fabric reads data from lakehouses in Microsoft Fabric.

Layer

A method of visually representing geographic data. A map can contain multiple layers, and each layer is rendered as one legend item on that map. On a road map, for example, roads, national parks, political boundaries, and rivers can each be considered unique, separate layers. When you add data to a map, ArcGIS Maps for Fabric creates a layer for that data and includes it in the Layers list. Once the layer is created, editable functionality such as layer visibility, style configurations, and transparency is enabled.

Lines

Also known as polylines. A type of feature geometry containing ordered point coordinates and a spatial reference. Each point on a line can be expressed as an x,y coordinate, with an optional z-value for elevation and m-value for linear referencing.

Map

A collection of layers that displays geographic data and is used to explore and interact with that data. Within ArcGIS Maps for Fabric you can add your data stored in Microsoft Fabric data directly to a map and combine it with content from ArcGIS.

Microsoft Fabric

A cloud-based analytics and data platform designed to unify an organization’s many sources of data into one environment.

OneLake

The proprietary data storage architecture for Microsoft Fabric, unifying all organizational data in a single data storage architecture. OneLake includes multiple lakehouses. Workloads integrate with OneLake to read and store data on the platform so that other services can access it.

Parquet

Parquet is a standardized open-source columnar storage format. Parquet is highly structured, meaning it stores the schema and data type of each column with the data files. GeoParquet extends the Parquet format by defining how geospatial data should be stored, including the representation of geometries and the required additional metadata. GeoParquet's structure enables interoperability between any system that reads or writes spatial data in Parquet format.

Points

A type of geometry that represents discrete locations of geographic features, such as well locations, telephone poles, and stream gauges. They contain a single set of x,y coordinates and a spatial reference and are often expressed in longitude (x) and latitude (y) values. They can also have an optional z-value for elevation and an m-value for linear referencing. Points can also represent address locations, GPS coordinates, or mountain peaks. Points show us where events or places are. Visualizing point data on a map can provide spatial context for their associated attribute data, which give us an understanding of what is at those points, including quantity, the magnitude of events, when events occurred, and even how things changed over time. This is the basis for GIS.

Polygons

Geometric enclosed areas (many-sided figures) that represent the shape and location of features such as states, counties, parcels, and land-use zones. Polygons are often called areas. Each polygon is composed of a series of x,y coordinates, or points, and a spatial reference, as well as an optional z-value that defines each x,y coordinate's elevation, and an optional m-value for linear referencing. These define the precise location (latitude and longitude) of the polygon's boundary. Like points, visualizing polygons provides spatial context for their associated attribute data. Point data can be aggregated to polygons to simplify the visual interpretation of large datasets or provide context to associated areas.

Workloads

Specialized applications that can be used to manage and analyze data in the Microsoft Fabric environment. Workloads can add capacity to Fabric by extending your ability to manage, analyze, and visualize your data. ArcGIS Maps for Fabric is an example of a workload in Microsoft Fabric.