Access the course material on GitHub: https://github.com/jakobzhao/geog495
Meetings:
- Lectures: Tuesdays and Thursdays 1:00 - 2:20 PM SMI 105
- Labs: Friday 12:30 - 1:20 PM (BA) and 1:30 - 1:20 PM (BB) in SMI 401
Instructional Team:
- Bo Zhao, Instructor, zhaobo@uw.edu | Office Hour: Thursdays 2:45 to 4:45 PM by appointment
- Steven Bao, Teaching Assistant, bxq98@uw.edu | Office Hour: Wednesdays 2:30 to 3:30PM at SMI 401 (It is recommended to make an appointment here if you plan to come.)
Web GIS, the convergence of web, mobile technology, and GIS, is a promising and fast-growing field in academia and industry. It has extended the power of GIS from local servers to the cloud, and put online maps and geospatial intelligence in multiple aspects of human society. In the past decades, multiple disciplines such as geography, built environment, transportation, forestry, and oceanography have benefited from the expanded analytical power of GIS from the local to the web. The integration of the Web and GIS has catalyzed an increasing number of significant technological advances, such as smart cities, location-based services, autonomous driving, or pandemic dashboards. This course provides students with the essential knowledge for web GIS project management, teaches the latest geospatial cloud technologies for building modern web GIS applications, and inspires students with real-world case studies. To promote equal access to web mapping technology, we ensure all the Web GIS applications from course materials can be executed, debugged, or further developed in either Windows or Mac OSX operating systems. And all the required software and packages are open source or free. This course is comprised of two major components, including lectures and lab exercises. The lectures focus on the theories and principles behind Web GIS, including web architecture, front-end coding, responsive design, and web-based spatial analyses. The labs help students to practice what has been learned from the lecture sessions and hone their skills in web programming and web GIS development.
🎯 Course Objectives
- Grasp the fundamental knowledge of web systematic architecture, GIS project management, geospatial data client, server, and web based spatial analyses.
- Develop web based GIS applications using either open source or proprietary geospatial web frameworks.
- Demonstrate competence with hands-on experiences in managing web GIS projects (e.g., web server, apache 2 server, tomcat, etc.), coding with latest web technologies (e.g., html, css, JavaScript), getting familiar with web based geospatial cloud technologies (e.g., mapbox, leaflet, openstreetmaps, etc.), and conducting spatial analysis on the web.
- Assess the user experience of a real-world web GIS application, and reflect upon its social implications (e.g., geo-privacy, national security, deepfake, etc.)