Geography 292: Geospatial Analysis with Web GIS
Module 2: 10/13/2025 - 12/5/2025, OWU Environment & Sustainability
My first project is a little quick capture app with four metro parks I like, with popups of trail maps and the ability to add pictures of invasive species, wildflowers, trash, or animals.
My second one is a real time dashboard with a focused scene of my neighborhood and the adjacent park in Columbus, showing code enforcement cases (layer downloaded from city of Columbus public data portal)
https://arcg.is/1azvKr0
Chapter 7
I can see how some of the metaverse and XR things would connect to real-time data, with the example of utilities in the book. It would also be cool for tracking things like weather or buses!
For my chapter 5-7 app I should get away from metro parks because the indoor views sound cool. I could make a dashboard with 3d indoor views with places I go to or work at in Columbus, or I live in a cool area with lots of bars and venues so it would be interesting to make a scene of those? I have a mirror world of my watering hole in my head so if there’s no web layer for that I can make it from scratch. Then maybe I can make it show if somewhere is crowded so I can avoid it.
How does it get info to call or email people in a space… do I have to know it? Hm. (if GIS can pull people’s contact info from them being in a location that would be wild and give me far too much power)
More detailed layers cant be edited but can they collect real time data?
The stories with the scenes just kind of showed how to browse them and stuff from the book but it’ll be good to refer back to.Â
In making the scene, I had to do some googling to find that elevation mode is in properties, not styles. Otherwise it was easy.
Then I used 2D layers to make 3D park scenes and that was pretty simple. This would be cool if I did another project with the metro parks.
The view was kind of sparse? It didn’t show much besides a couple bushes and I couldn’t see other parks. On the next step, I couldn’t see the helicopters… turns out there are just multiple red hill community parks ok.
Parking a car was fun. Also shoutout to whoever put the giant helicopter that surrounds the whole park. Then, I sliced a helicopter and made a little elevation profile.
Chapter 5:
On a practical note this chapter might be difficult with my commuting status… do we have to do this on the GIS lab computers or is there a cloud we can access? Addendum: No haha
The data analysis and deep learning mention makes me wonder if I could apply that to my project, making identifying invasive plants easier? I want to do something with that in this tutorial and I feel a little let down now.
Most of the pre-tutorial seems more important to OWU than us. Unless my practical concern is a concern. Also it’s all so much technical jargon that it’s hard to keep up.
I remember sharing maps from ArcGISPro in 291 so I understood the first parts of the tutorial pretty well. One thing I noticed was that the file sizes for the cached layers were a lot lower than the tutorial said, maybe it was another update or I skipped something, but I tried to go back and there weren’t any errors. It will be interesting to see how the same layers compare as different types. I guess using the web maps provided means I won’t find out if I made a mistake with the detail level sliders provided.
Making the story with the provided web maps and app was pretty easy. I struggle a little to format the stories and make them look nice still though. I’m pretty sure the map on the left in the app is the raster tile layer, because I don’t have to zoom as far in for the features to disappear. I can definitely see how vector layers are more useful for general cartography, while raster tile layers would be more for specific requests.
Chapter 6
The concept of smart cities and smart homes is a little frightening to me… but I see how important GIS is to those things and the IoT. Without those connections between everything GIS could not exist, and the connections themselves rely on GIS.
Geofences seem like the real time version of the buffers we did in ArcGISPro.
Is there a dashboard for making one mega franken-app
Some dating apps also use missions I think?
The tutorial starts by having us look at emergency dispatch maps that constantly refresh, then add live highway views. I think I see stuff like these for trail cams sometimes.
To put the map, gauge and list together I just kind of dragged them and didn’t need to resize the map. There is an extra list in my dashboard because I didn’t do all the steps on the first one and then couldn’t figure out how to delete it!
As I added more elements, things got kind of squished and the pie chart became tiny. Can a dashboard have multiple pages? Adjusting the map helped slightly to make things more proportional, though.
I couldn’t see the text color change but maybe none of the presumably fake people were having a heart attack? I tried messing with other colors in other parts of the code and making sure both highlighted parts were in there but to no avail. There were 3’s on the list so I did do something wrong -_- I couldn’t get any of the arcade parts to work so I’m skipping that because honestly!!! I’m doing this late and going kind of insane.
Here is my dash board, good luck knowing if someone’s having a heart attack.
I noticed the option to set the time zone was in map viewer, not when I uploaded the layer.
The time slider settings option was nonexistent ok.
Here is the app!
https://arcg.is/0u809H1
Chapter 3:
SO experience builder just kind of modifies and combines apps and widgets? I like how it interconnects
Please don’t make me use the developer one my computer is crying
I kind of feel like I’m making an overcomplicated powerpoint again.. Therefore I chose spin animation instead of zoom in.
I put the maps next to each other as I modified the 3D one, so they would be easier to see. Also had some trouble getting it to snap to the corners so I just dragged the maps. Another thing that helped me that the book didn’t mention is being able to select widgets. I added a fade in effect to the image in the data summary and it looked pretty cool in the live view. I kind of wish it would select the hurricane or earthquake on the 3d map instead of just hiding everything else.
I also adjusted the colors and font in data view to make it look fancy, and I tried to find a way to center the text better but the centering options i could see just moved the text box.
I was very confused at the table part because there was no blank spot, but it turned out the page was wider and I wasn’t zoomed out. I had another issue earlier with the dynamic content where I struggled to find the pane because it popped up hidden in a corner. Are there some weird presets?
The filters and SQL expressions were also a lot like desktop
When it was time to embed the link, I had to paste it into my browser and copy that link because it didn’t accept the shortened one. That’ll be important to remember. Here’s the final product for chapter 3.
CHapter 4:
For my project I think it would be so cool to actually go to metro parks and take my own pictures, and attach them to a map to make my own feature layer. Enabling public attachments would also be a nice way to make it an interactive and collaborative web experience.
Starting on Survey123 and it’s ok so far. I think the imagery with labels basemap will be perfect for my metro parks project
Site kept glitching out and zooming back out to the whole world when I tried to go to Delaware. Eventually I had to refresh it a bunch and allow it to get my location through my computer.
I had to add the rule for showing the recyclable categories in a completely different way than the tutorial said. When I opened the survey on my phone and selected recyclables, the type question came up so I guess whatever I did did the trick!
When I started making my own layer and adding fields I noticed that the tutorial had the wrong order to do things in. Choosing the type (integer) is before naming the layer. I think the website has been updated a bit since the book was put out.
The quick capture project was pretty simple to put together and I think I could make something with that for my project. It wouod be a great tool for recording locations and capturing pictures of invasive plants, and maybe i could attach it to a second app that gives a rundown on identifying them for people without a botanical background. Adding images to the forms might help too.
For the AuGeo app, I’ll test that later because I picked a couple places in Columbus, but here’s one of them. I’ll make a note to add them to next week’s post.
Chapter 1
I’ve always been an “own your files” guy but I like the collaborative aspect of the cloud, and that the public has some access to the services as well. Everything being online makes me worry about security, but although I don’t know the technical stuff very well I think AWS has to be pretty secure considering how many things run on it.
Definitely so far web gis seems to have more features and a simpler layout than desktop, and seems much more simplified for people like me who are significantly more nature and field work aligned than into technology.
Still super excited to mess around with mobile stuff. If it’s not assigned I might on my own anyways. And augmented reality is always interesting. I have to imagine putting geographic layers over your vision would give a whole new perspective on the landscape and the map/scene. We didn’t get to do a whole lot with scenes in 291 so doing those more online will be sweet
A lot of this was gone over in the online esri tutorials. I found myself skimming through a bit that already made sense to me, either from there or 291.
I thought the first tutorial was easy and fun to do. Configuring the pop ups was a bit of a struggle, because as much as I tried I couldn’t get the picture to upload for ESRI. the link to the powerpoint did show up in the pop up caption, at least. These kinds of stories are an exciting way to show images by location and in my opinion, makes geographical information palatable to the general public. I guess that’s the whole point of GIS isn’t it!
After this I didn’t realize we didn’t have to do the assignment at the end, and I skipped ahead to chapter 2 a bit to try and figure out how to do it. I decided to just map out a few of my favorite metro parks and actually started making a CSV file with their locations. I ended up asking Krygier before getting further and decided to save time and use that as a bit of a starter idea? It would get significantly more complicated than just parks and popup images like I was planning, in that case.
Chapter 2
Smart mapping sounds really interesting and seems like it would help with some of the confusion I had with desktop GIS, particularly things like making aure all the data is cleaned and lined up. Well, I can’t imagine it can compensate for sloppy nasty data but it seems like it would help make it clear *where* the slop is.
Arcade makes no sense to me, I had to look over the book a few times to see that it’s just a way of doing math. Because I can do that, but generally I see anything that looks like code and my brain shuts off.
The Living Atlas sounds fun to look through. The concept of having premade layers to combine and tell your own story sounds like a good way to be creative with less busy work. I think there’s a lot of potential for artistic expression and flow in this program, and I’m wondering what kind of interactive forest cover, tree type, hydrology, who even knows layers for my metro parks app. Finally I’m glad to be doing stories more because I didn’t really parse that in 291.
In the second tutorial, I found the way the CSV file seamlessly fit into the data appealing. I’m glad I did the tutorial before working more on my other assignment, because I would not have realized that you still have to kind of plug the data in, at least with the addresses. Anyways, it all showed up, but I had significant trouble with such a small thing: even with all the panes closed I could not get the map to the exact right extent to show all the cities with their names. Like I said, just a small thing that made me mad. I don’t know if the program has set zoom distances or if I just have butter fingers. In the map, at the end of 2.2, I just hit “zoom to layer” and accepted that viewers would just have to click on some cities to see the names.
Also kind of an aside but if I was making this tutorial I wouldn’t want the shadows. I thought they were ugly and distracted from the actual information being displayed.
On to arcade, it was bad. I struggled to find globals until I realized it was actually the profile variables menu. Eventually, I got it, and configured the pop ups.
On to the story, I struggled to find the right scene and web map because I was searching in the wrong search bar! It’s the top top one. Then starting out the story was ok but I couldn’t find the add map action button anywhere, no matter where I looked. I tried messing around with the map tour but that was something else. The text in the menu is weirdly light so I could barely see it! So, I moved on. I added the scene, and then, the express map and last image. So, the story is mostly complete.
I guess my idea, based on what I started in chapter 1, could definitely involve metro parks! I could make a map of them and make popups with pictures of things to see there, as well as data about things like trail difficulty, wildlife, or distributions of trees or wildflowers. Maybe I could make an easy visual guide for which parks to go to to see which plants or wildlife?
Hi, my name is Hektor and I’m a senior(ish…) double majoring in art and environmental studies. I took the quiz and scheduled my appointment, and did a tutorial linked in the Getting Started pages and the Basics one as well. I already have an account from 291. In the getting started parts, I wondered right off the bat if we have access to the ArcGIS Companion app because it would be cool to be able to work on this on the go… or on location! I also thought the indoor floor view sounded interesting, and less limited than what the desktop version could do with splitting up features. Anyways, the first tutorial I did was mapping obesity rates in Alabama, which was linked in those pages. It was pretty straightforward once I got the hang of it, and similar to desktop GIS, just differently arranged. I did finish the tutorial in Alabama, I just had this one screenshot but the finished product is (should be) shared with everyone.
And here’s my certificate from the Basics Tutorial.
Then I looked for a couple maps. This first one is a whole infographic about runoff.
https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/arcnews/with-gis-communities-see-how-land-use-changes-may-affect-local-water-quality
The second one I’m linking because its an interactive map!