Author: sdroberts

For the first application I finally finished a geographical profile of the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. This was a very hard project for me to do as many of the addresses listed as the crime scenes are on streets that have different names in the present day at best and no longer exist at worst. I did my best to find any geographical information on the crime scenes but given the fact I am working with a large scale map, any errors would likely be relatively minor, (getting building numbers wrong, ETC.) something that was very helpful in creating this was the pop ups which helped me label the crime scenes, write details on the victims, and attach photos/drawings of the crime scenes.

https://owugis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=82b656f6de5a44adafeca2ca3932199d

My second application was a more fun one, it was tracking the path of the Zeppelin L-59 on its famous journey from Bulgaria to German East Africa in 1917. (Though the flight was unsuccessful due to an abort message being sent.) Here I had a lot more freedom to indulge in the many features of ArcGIS online, such as physically drawing L-59’s flight path, adding data points where L-59 was built, where her hanger was, and her approximate destination. Working this really put into perspective just how far the Zeppelin had traveled and I had so much fun with this I might even get my own personal ArcGIS account to track other long distance airship flights.

https://owugis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=ea6c9d0aad494e12b60c1893f57a1a58

I will have to admit, I did not expect chapter 7 to be that long. I probably should have.

Chapter 7 was actually my favorite. I found many of the 3D maps on the software GIS to be purely data focused and as a result, kind of boring. I do think that the web GIS maps offer significantly more as far as a geographic experience goes and I realized through reading this that I had experience with this in high school where my German teacher built a 3D map of Berlin foe us to explore in VR with data points and historical markers pretty much everywhere. (Though I don’t plan on using VR for the final project in this course however.)

The most interesting part of this entire chapter in my opinion was the ability to add feature layers with benches, mailboxes and other street junk. I tried to boot up one of the 3D maps to play around with this but I found it to be very lagging. I don’t know if it was just my computer or if it was just too much information for a web browser to handle but I hope to give it another shot soon as the 3D maps look very interesting.

Chapters Five and Six were done rather smoothly and at this point I felt comfortable enough to work on what I hope will be a great final project to fully sum up how I am learning web GIS. I know I wanted to do a geographic profile of Jack the Ripper in my last GEOG class and here I am finally doing it. I find the web GIS to be easier to use then the software GIS and I am already on the first stages of creating an information layer.

One concern I do have is that I am having a rather hard time creating pop ups that have distinct information about these events, to the point where I fear I will have to create a different layer for each point on the map. If I could only give each point it’s own title and brief description. I felt like editing the features of points on the map was significantly easier in the software then it is here.

Chapter 3 and 4 primarily documented introductions for ArcGIS mobile and ArcGIS Experience Builder.

I found experimenting with these to be rather a redundant experience as I didn’t quite understand the advantage to using those apps over the base ArcGIS website. Nonetheless, as I continue experimenting and playing around with the features on the web GIS, I am now finding it to be significantly easier then the desktop GIS software as it feels like the majority of the features which I found to be rather useless in the  desktop GIS are removed allowing for a greater and more streamlined experience.

The story maps are also a huge upgrade to the cold, soulless maps I used in the previous GIS class. It is honestly a really interesting experience to add photos and details in the pop ups. I hope to get my story map done as my final exam in this class.

As someone who had some difficulty using the desktop GIS, I had some high hopes that web GIS would be more straightforward as it did not require a whole software system nor an external hard drive. However the first week of learning the ropes of web GIS proved me VERY wrong.  Though map and scene creation was significantly easier for me, I found the uploading and copying of data onto the map and the logistics of the layers to be rather troublesome to learn. I’ll have to devote some extra time to learn the ins and outs of this software this week.

One hope I do have for web GIS is that the final project would not be limited strictly to activities within Delaware County, as I found that to be a rather frustrating limitation when I was working on my project last unit.

My name is Gustav. This is my week one post. Most everything required I have done in GEOG 291.