I like the category scheme that has been selected. It is a great improvement over the category/scale scheme of old. Is there a plan to take the features and place them into feature datasets by those categories? As data gets added and the number of features expands, is there a concern about the bulkiness of having the features under a single workspace?
No plans for feature datasets being reintroduced. I promise! They are a bit a of a nightmare maintenance-wise as one person reading one feature class within the feature dataset puts a schema lock on the entire feature dataset.
I think what we'll do instead is to try and make the database schema less transparent to the casual user. We'll publish ArcMap layer files (.lyr) to the data download portion of the website so we can leverage the categories to show smaller sets of the whole 400+ SGID data layers. The .lyr files will be symbolized and labeled where appropriate and it's possible to have multiple .lyr files per feature class. For example, we could publish a overall land ownership layer but also a forest service or state parks specific layer.
