Wrapping up Web GIS at UMass

Throughout this semester, we’ve been working with a Five College class at UMass called “Community Service with Web-Based Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIST)” that Jon was co-teaching.  The five Smith students in the class worked on two semester-long projects for their community partners.  We encountered many bumps along the way, but despite it all the two groups both developed impressive websites and proof-of-concept web maps.

 

 

energydashboard

Smith College Energy Dashboard

By Katie Ferrall ’16, Sri Wahyuni ’17, and Karen Yu ’16

Katie, Sri, and Karen developed this web map for Smith College Facilities. It provides a centralized location to visualize data on electricity, water, and gas consumption for metered buildings on campus.  The current version shows data for just one day, but the team hopes that future versions will include a time slider for visualizing trends across seasons.  Their initial vision was to show historical data and real-time data, but unfortunately Smith’s current utility management software, BuildingOS, makes that very difficult.  Perhaps future students could add in this feature when Smith transitions to a new utility management software in a few months.  The team hopes that their project will help students in environmental and engineering classes to more easily access Smith’s meter data and prompt inter-house competitions to see who can most reduce their consumption.

 

 

nohotrails

Northampton Bike Trail Map

By June Ahn ’18, Lucy Hall ’19, Julian Hartmann-Russell (UMass), and Ina Shkurti (UMass)

This team’s map displays bike trails, bike-friendly roads, hiking trails, and open space in Northampton so that users can more easily plan a biking or hiking trip.  It also displays the user’s location on the map, so that you can use it for navigation on your phone while on a trip.  June, Lucy, Julian, and Ina hope that future students will include a routing function and some kind of trail difficulty rating based on steepness.

 

 

Congrats to all the students for putting together these impressive maps! We look forward to seeing what other web maps they create with their new skills.