Bath Data Capture Project

Peoples Map and Bath Spa University are working together on two data capture projects. The Bath Spa 2nd year GIS students are mapping the city of Bath and beyond and the 3rd year GIS students are mapping the entire Isle of Wight.

Getmapping and Geosense, both shareholders in the Peoples Map, have had a long standing relationship with Bath Spa GIS Department where students have been working on Knowledge Transfer Projects (KTP’s). Getmapping/Geosense has also employed a few graduate students into their permanent teams. This relationship has worked well in the past as Bath Spa and the students specifically benefit from working with and in a commercial environment and we as a commercial entity, gain from the skills and expertise of the academia.

With this latest Peoples Map/Bath Spa venture, the Peoples Map benefit as Bath and the surrounding area is accurately mapped in the Peoples Map, but more importantly, the students not only learn and experience how data is captured and processed, but will also see how this data forms part of a commercial product. This gives them insight on how the data they capture, can be used within a commercial project.

In this data capture project, 15 Bath Spa students are using the Peoples Map, Getmapping Aerial Images and tools like GPS, MapInfo & Peoples Map Editing Suite to survey and digitise the entire city of Bath and beyond. In total they will cover an area of 10 square kilometers. Each student have the opportunity to cover urban as well as rural areas where they are collecting roads, point of interests and land use polygons. This project started at the end of September and the students are now one month into their data capture module. The project is scheduled for completion by the 1st of December and we will see the final data displayed in the Peoples Map by the end of this year. All the data created by the students will be put through the normal Peoples Map verification process to insure that this data is correct and up to date before it is loaded into the final Peoples Map layer.

I am really excited to see how the Bath data set will evolve over the next month, but more specially look forward to meet the students and discuss how they experienced this project, what was the pro’s and the cons, etc. The Peoples Map is changing and improving by the day and by receiving feedback from our users, we can keep our improvements relevant to the task at hand!