Globally celebrated GIS Day features annual events with mapping focus
Recently released open data of the city of Guelph and surrounding regions titled the GeoDataHub was officially celebrated at a city hall event on GIS Day to promote these resources. One great example of the products found is the Neighbourhood “awesomeness” map, a user-created collection of awesome things about the city.
Globally, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) helped to manage that data by organizing layers of information with useful symbols and associated colours to visualize details in a supportive way for the end user. Most maps produced are designed with a user or purpose in mind, such as a road map for navigating or a single-themed focus like statistics per capita. This means information that isn’t helpful for the user can be omitted. The local event was designed to showcase how city employees and citizens of Guelph use GIS on a daily basis to solve problems that involve spatial data. Spatial data differs from many online data resources as there is a location element included, and often it uses a map viewer online to help visualize the extent and detail of the information. This helps the user make the choice of utilizing the data and in what way(s).
As a geographer and cartographer by recent training at COGS (Centre for Geography Sciences) in Lawrencetown, N.S., I have enjoyed making use of this data already this term for The Ontarion-featured maps showing Guelph voting wards and compost bin locations. The data is easily accessible in a dynamic set of formats for all kinds of users and purposes.
In most of the newspaper maps, data management began by using the KML export option, with Google Earth being my first step in managing this information to compare to known local features. After viewing the data and knowing it covers the extent of Guelph that makes sense for the project at hand, I would open the dataset in whichever other geospatial software makes the most sense for the end product: Esri’s (Environmental Systems Research Institute)’s ArcGIS, or open-source QGIS with plug-ins supporting the functionality of ArcMap more and more with each new upgrade.
Maps are of course found all over the Internet, hosted by routing services and local servers; one local example using data from GeoDataHub is an interactive ward-based information map made available to the public in October of 2018 by Abhilash Kantamneni, a graduate student in geography at U of G.
The geography department (housed in Hutt building here at U of G) has access to the proprietary software built by Esri, a California company which has nearly 4,000 employees globally, dedicated to producing analytic and artistic components of the robust service package available to paid customers. There is an online hosted free public account option for their ArcGIS Online platform, which can be a helpful way to make use of this Guelph data without having access to the full desktop suite of options. Open-source data management platforms are also possible options which reduce the cost of managing software, but do not have the same power as Esri to support constant iterations of updated versions.
The Esri website explains the intention behind GIS Day as: “One Fun Day to Celebrate GIS with everyone, Discover and explore the benefits of GIS, Showcase the uses of GIS, Build and nurture your GIS community.”
The first GIS Day was on Nov. 19, 1999 during Geography Awareness Week, led by avid promotion from the National Geographic Society since GIS Week was developed in 1987. Typically events are hosted by schools, alumni, community organizations, and municipal offices where GIS is fundamental to the daily operations of maintaining public services. Each year the technology has grown to include more interactivity, leading modern events to be held online welcoming contributors in the style of OpenStreetMap — or even Google’s option to suggest map edits. Information is in the acronym, so at the root of all the events, there is a layered understanding of how technically fascinating the capacity is for the software now compared to its early development in the 1960s.
A map of all events (voluntarily submitted) can be found at www.gisday.com in support of open data and communities being strengthened by maps! Examples of products by GIS Day event participants around the globe are found at www.gisday.com/discover-gis.html
Photo courtesy of City of Guelph