ArcWeb Services—Public Services, a free development environment for public interest sites, is now available for developers looking to build rich, Web-enabled mapping applications for personal, noncommercial, and nongovernmental use. This development environment delivers the power of GIS on the Web to individuals who want to develop and share Web-enabled mapping applications focused on public interests and to meet the needs of the communities in which they live and serve. Examples of public interest sites include civic groups, clubs, and volunteer groups.

The ArcWeb Services Map Viewer provides a powerful tool for demonstrating the data and functionality available through ArcWeb Services—Public Services.

ArcWeb Services—Public Services allows public interest developers to rapidly create and share detailed maps, locate places and addresses, generate routes, and perform queries against their data. It represents an important leap forward because developers of these sites do not have to worry about purchasing and maintaining large datasets. Public Services also provides an environment that is permanently free of advertising.

ArcWeb Services—Public Services is offered as a set of free global mapping services available through free viewer applications and open developer APIs. Public Services is implemented via the commercially available ArcWeb Services platform and provides access to almost all of ArcWeb Services—Commercial Services functionality and a significant portion of the data.

National Geographic Society and Esri Business Partners GlobeXplorer LLC and Tele Atlas/TomTom North America are sponsoring ArcWeb Services—Public Services by providing access to their respective map datasets.

To sign up for access, visit www.esri.com/awspublicservices.