Archived

Safe software training data to AGOL - Vancouver open data

Related products:FME FormIntegrations

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
August 24, 2026
2 replies
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+69

j.botterill
Evangelist

Many of the FME Academy examples use the City of Vancouver Open Data portal datasets, including Property Parcel Polygons, Addresses, Zoning, Parks, and Street Trees.

These datasets are not generally hosted in ArcGIS Online by Safe Software, but they are available through the City of Vancouver Open Data APIs and can be consumed directly in FME.

Home — City of Vancouver Open Data Portal and parcels example

FME user can download these publicly available datasets SHPs, GDBs etc from github unpacking them to C:\FMEData\Data which the training workspaces reference.

I would like to suggest either:

Making the commonly used FME training datasets available as ArcGIS Online hosted feature layers (should their license allow Safe to ETL them to AGOL), and/or
Publishing an article demonstrating how to consume the Vancouver Open Data datasets directly from ArcGIS Online using:
- ArcGISFeatureService Reader (safe.esri.agol) package
- ArcGIS Online Connector
- Other ArcGIS-related readers and transformers where appropriate

+12

samatsafe
Safer
Forum|Forum|1 month ago
August 24, 2026

Hello @j.botterill. Thanks for the idea. Can you clarify why you’d like to access the data using ArcGIS Online? Is this just for your own training purposes, to learn how to interact with ArcGIS Online using FME?

If you are interested in learning more about a specific format, we would usually point you to the FME Support Knowledge Base rather than the FME Academy, as the latter focuses more on generic FME skills than on specific formats.

I would also point out that much of our training data does not use Esri formats.

Our normal recommendation when taking FME Academy content is to either:

Use the URLs from the Resources section that point to the data hosted on S3, which are used in basically every workspace in the Academy.
- This ensures learners' access to the data without requiring any downloads.
- It also doesn’t place undue stress on the City of Vancouver’s public data site by pointing to our own version (not that it would be much).
- Additionally, the data on the City of Vancouver’s site is constantly changing; to ensure it matches our exercise instructions, we need to use a snapshot. This is why we don’t point to the live data.
Download FMEData.zip and extract it to the C:\ drive, as you mentioned. You can download it from GitHub or the Training Archive.