By Blake Andrew Lytle
A new database of spatial information for Clemson’s campus lies at the heart of the Mapping TigerTown project, which staff and interns at the Clemson Center for Geospatial Technologies (CCGT) presented last week. The project website features state-of-the-art geographic information systems (GIS) technologies, including multimedia story maps that offer a glimpse into why Clemson is such a special place, mobile apps for quickly locating parking, dining, and buildings on campus (and near you), and interactive 3D maps of Clemson’s campus and the R.M. Cooper Library. The project began in the spring and much of the effort went into creating the spatial data, which are freely available for anyone to use for their own mapping or research projects.
The next phase of the project centers around mapping campus safety, particularly where members of the Clemson community feel unsafe. CCGT encourages everyone to participate in its short survey by clicking “Sign in with Enterprise ID,” then typing “clemson” in the ArcGIS box and signing in with their Clemson credentials.
The presentation brought together people from a variety of departments and groups on campus. Faculty and students in Civil, Environmental, and Industrial Engineering engaged with members of the Libraries, Cyberinfrastructure Technology Integration group, My.Clemson App developers, and University Planning and Design, who provided data utilized for the new spatial database. Discussion following the project presentation highlighted the potential for future collaborations and data sharing between administrative entities, such as Planning and Design, and faculty who can incorporate those data into research or teaching curricula. The data could also be used for improving accessibility on campus, in emergency management, or as a base for developing sophisticated routing apps.
The mapping project provided a setting for CCGT staff and interns to hone their GIS skills and continue to improve as a resource for Clemson. Lu Xu, an intern and Master’s student in Landscape Architecture, created detailed 3D models for 57 campus buildings (including a floor-by-floor interior model of Cooper Library), geo-located the buildings, and published these data to interactive web scenes. Jonathan O’Brien, a CCGT undergraduate intern majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Digital Production Arts, used mobile GIS apps to map the locations of 27,361 trees, 86 bike racks, and 27 dining locations as well as contributed to the multimedia story maps. “Working on the project gave me an opportunity to apply skills specific to my major and minor. On one hand, I was able to learn field data collection methods that could be very useful for documenting archaeological sites, and on the other I was able to work on the media and presentation of the project.”
