Submitted by Jason Young
on
Each year the GIS Workshop, GEOG 469, invites clients into the classroom to work with students to solve real-world problems using GIS. Several years ago Dr. Tim Nyerges brought in one real-world problem that hit close to home--how to improve human accessibility to campus space here at the University of Washington. The students, working with Aaron Cheuvront of the UW Capital Projects Office, worked to develop a custom integration process between floor plans of campus buildings and GIS, which has enabled the utilization of GIS for interior space mapping at a large scale. In other words, this integration allowed GIS users to explore the layouts of campus buildings. More recently Aaron was able to collaborate with individuals at Esri Canada to transform this project into an iOS application. By feeding the students' routing data into a pre-existing application, they were able to develop a fully functional, mobile tool for navigation inside buildings on campus. Ideally this application would help students to find classrooms, among other uses. Aaron continues to look for funding to extend coverage of the prototype application to all of campus. To learn more, check out this video of the data in action!
Fantastic to see the class project of several Geography students transform into something that might help future students!