Active Web Maps - Whew!, It worked.

Setting up an active online web map takes effort and planning.  The more effort and planning on the front end the fewer times one needs to update, fix and redo the whole thing.   This week tied in very well with my intern experience at Middle Georgia Regional Commission, Macon, GA.     The Regional Commission's next major service venture is to be the "web publisher" for online maps of it's smaller county clients who do not have GIS or IT departments.  The field trip was to a local city office to demonstrate how the Regional Commission was publishing their local utility services to the public on the web using arcmap online map publishing services.  Our office set up a group, base map with editable data layers.   We demonstrated and trained the staff to edit their maps and update the physical location of water meters, grease traps and manholes using a personal ipad and iphone as the local gps device.  They edited the map by adding a point, it showed up in the system within a few minutes; their coworkers could see the point appear as a new attribute. Pop-ups were configured by MgRC with data attributes served as in house file folders for the city's data. We realized after 3-5 minutes of demonstration and practice that more administrative limits for editing and backups needed to be in place.   The more the parties practiced the more they realized most of their data was out of date and needed to be edited. oopps.

Our lesson this week was to add feature layers to an online map using csv files, photos, street scenes and general information.    Not much different than my field trip.  This time I was the one setting up the map, instead of watching.   Just as my supervisor said - the more planning and strategy set out in the front end resulted in fewer updates and edits.
Here's my map showing Evacuation routes from Tampa General Hospital. This represents the actual sceniero that they faced during the convention.





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