Thursday, November 19, 2015

Special Topics; Food Deserts and Open Source Webmapping

Greetings,
     Welcome to the continuation of the Special Topics look at food deserts. This is the first of two weeks of analysis type work. Although this week more effort went into analyzing how the data would be presented in a few weeks by looking into web mapping applications built around presenting maps to the public in an open source manner. Last week we started the look at open source, ie Free ways to work with GIS data such as QGIS. This week we are transforming some of that prep work into the web forum in preparation of distributing it to the masses. The overall objectives of this week are:

  • Navigate through, and add layers to Tilemill
  • Gain familiarity with Leaflet
  • Use tiled layers and plug-ins in a Web map. 
   So what are the programs that these objectives mention?  The main theme to note with all of them before looking at them individually is that they are OPENSOURCE! FREE. That means anyone who wants can acquire them, learn about them, and in most cases contribute to the community with them.
   Tilemill is an interactive mapping software predominately used by cartographers and journalists to create interactive maps for sharing with the public.
   Leaflet is a javascripting utility which allows you to code html web maps for display, much like the one linked below.
   The layer tiling mentioned in the last objective was accomplished with some basic html code on notepad, and shared on a webmapping host.

   This http://students.uwf.edu/bd26/STGIS//EscWebMap.html is the link to the culmination of this weeks efforts. It combines the objectives mentioned above with the data we looked at last week for food deserts in the Pensacola Fl, area. Every feature or option on this map falls into one of the objectives above. Note the layers that are turn on- off-able in the upper right, or the find function in the lower left. The points, polygon and circle also are very specific. Each of these elements is an individual block or segment of code which was pre-thought out to contribute to the map in this specific manner. This was all done to get familiar with these applications and get ready to present my own specific area exploring food deserts in a couple weeks, not just the Pensacola information here. Stay tuned as I continue to work toward open source processing and food desert analysis. Thank you.

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