CSE 6331.002, Spring 2017

Project: Designing University of Texas at Arlington’s Map on any GIS and Spatial Database

In this project students are asked to make the University’s map and surrounding apartment housing for students. Covering all the departments, residential halls, apartments, different playgrounds and administrative offices. The purpose of this project would be for them to learn how to extract KML files from Google maps and converting them to shapefiles so that the shapefiles can be used in either QGIS, ArcGIS or PostGIS or even SpatiaLite.

Once the students have made the map then they are asked to find the shortest distance between any given two points. They can use help of algorithms like Djikstra’s Algorithm by implementing it in Python or can also use built in application of ArcGIS.

Students will also have to identify points of interests (POIs) on the map based on the category of the POI, example: all the apartments will be in one category, within which two sub-categories can be on- campus housing and off-campus housing. Other categories of POIs can be: academic buildings; administrative buildings; athletic fields/playgrounds; etc. Examples of academic buildings would be ERB, Woolf Hall, Neddermann Hall etc. Your project should be able to answer queries like: list all the academic buildings or all the administrative buildings at the University of Texas at Arlington, or queries like: what are the closest apartment buildings to ERB.

Other sample queries could be:

1. List all the apartments within 2 miles of ERB.

2. How far is the Timber Brook apartment building from the UTA Central Library?

3. Find the shortest distance to reach central library from Timber Brook.

4. Nearest off-campus apartment from University Center.

All these queries and others (provided later) should be executed from the terminal and the GIS should display the results interactively.

You will need to display the results in a GIS, say, ArcGIS with:

1. Selection of operation: Example, Shortest distance, Locating a polygon etc.

2. Select the object(s).

3. Display the results.

Options 1 and 2 can be done using a drop-down menu.