GIS Project
Overview
The purpose of the GIS project is to provide students with a first hand experience on building a GIS-Enabled Urban Planning Support System by integrating open government data and other open source data sets. You will also learn how to collect, process and analyse spatially related issues using real world data. Students are encouraged to focus on research topics that are relevant to their field of study.
The project is to be done in a team. You are required to form a project team of 2-3 members by the second week of the academic term. Each project team must start thinking about their project ideas from week 8 onward. You are expected to discuss your project topic and scope of works with the instructor between week 8-9 of the academic term. A project website must be prepared and will be linked to this page by the end of week 10.
Topic
You are required to choose one of the sub-theme provided below:
Theme 1: Urban Application of Satellite Remote Sensing and GIS
Sub-theme 1: A comparison study of land cover classification by using Landsat 8 and Sentinel 2 data.
Sub-theme 2: Land cover change detection using high resolution multispectral satellite data.
Sub-theme 3: Land use classification by integrating GIS and remotely sensed data.
Theme 2: Geography of Accessibility with GIS-based Network Analysis
Sub-theme 1: Impact of closures or mergers of education institutions on equity of access.
Sub-theme 2: Catchment areas study of the Thomson-East Coast MRT Line Stage 4.
Scope of Work
The project will comprise of, but not limited to the followings steps:
- Selection of project focus and conducting literature review.
- Preparing proposal and project website.
- Data collection, extraction, integration, transformation and wrangling.
- Designing and building GIS model and database.
- Performing GIS analysis.
- Preparing poster and project webpage.
Project Milestone
- Formulation of project team: by week 2 before lesson
- Assemble GIS data: from week 7 onward
- Create project website : by week 8
- Submission of project poster: 10th Nov. 2022, 11:59PM (mid-night).
- Townhall presentation: 14th Nov 2022 (Monday), at 12:00-2:00pm. Venue: LKSLIB Basement concourse. Students are required to be at the venue latest by 11:30am to setup your project poster.
- Submission of project artifacts and update project webpage: 20th November 2022 at 11.59pm (mid-night)
Grading
The GIS project will account for 35% of your final grade in the course. The distribution of marks for each stage of the project are as follows:
- Townhall presentation (peer evaluation) 15%
- Project poster 15%
- Project website and report 30%
- Project artifact 40%
The course instructor will consider strongly the novelty of the idea (If it has never been done before, you will get lots of credit!), how it addresses the problem at hand, the methodology you employ in doing the research, and your technical skill in implementing the idea.
In small group projects, each person will be graded individually. A good group project is a system consisting of a collection of well defined subsystems. Each subsystem should be the responsibility of one person and be clearly identified as their project. A good criteria for whether you should work in a group is whether the system as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts!
Townhall Poster Presentation
A townhall presentation will be held on 14th November 2022 (Monday) between 11.30am - 2.30pm. The venue will be at SMU Basement Concourse.
Deliverables
Minutes of Meeting
To formulate the project proposal, you are required to have at least one round of brain-storming session and take down minutes of the discussion, disagreements, and consensus made within the team in the form of Minutes of Meeting. At least three differences should be included and a clear documentation on how the final decisions were reached must be provided. The Minutes of Meeting should also record the division of labour and the considerations involved in the decision made.
The following links provided useful guides on how to prepare the minutes of a meeting:
Project Website
Project Github
At the beginning of the project, project teams are required to create a project Github. The project Github should include all the materials used to develop the project and the written materials such as proposal, poster and project report. It must be used to maintain a complete project versioning including the application and project documents. The Github link must be included in the project webpage. By the end of the project, the project team must pack the final version of the Github repository and upload onto eLearn for final submission. The Github link also must be provided on eLearn.
Project Website
Each project team are required to create the project website by using either Quarto. It will be disseminated by using Netfity web server.
- The title of your project,
- A short description of not more than 350 word summarising the motivation, objectives, methodology and key findings, and
- The project proposal.
- Motivation of the project
- Project objective
- Data
- Scope of work
- Project schedule including a Gannt chart
- Methodology
- a detail documentation of the methods used.
- Results and Discussion
- Lesson learned
Poster
The poster should provide an overview of your project. It should include, but not limited to the following information:
- Issues and problems - A clear statement of the issues or/and problems that your project addresses.
- Motivation - An explanation of why the issues and/or problems are interesting and what make them difficult to solve.
- Approach - A description of the GIS analysis and other urban analysis techniques you used to solve the problem.
- Results - Screenshots and a working demo of the system you built.
- Future Work - An explanation of how the work could be extended.
The dimensions for the poster must conform to the International Standards Organization (ISO) poster size format (A1).
- Size = ISO A1 (594 × 841mm or 23.39 × 33.11inci)
- Resolution = 300dpi or above
- File format = jpeg
Please ensure that the poster is in high resolution.
The poster will be considered as a final deliverable. So don’t forget to apply good visual design principles to both your poster and project report.
Note: The course instructor will be responsible for printing your poster. You are required to upload your posters to the project webpage of your project one week and your project Dropbox before the poster presentation.
Below are sample posters for your reference:
Final Deliverable
The final deliverable will include:
- Fully updated project webpage
- Project Poster on project webpage
- Project Report on project webpage
- Project artifact, the complete GIS project folder including but not limited to raw data, process data, QGIS project file, and output maps.
Project Report
The project report should focus on but not limited to the followings:
- A detail discussion of the GIS analysis process and functions used.
- A comprehensive discussion of the analysis results.
- A collection of analytical maps (can be statics or interactive web maps)
Submission instruction
The project artefact is due (submitted to LMS Dropbox) by the end of the day on 20th November 2022 at 11.59pm (mid-night).
Sample Projects
Note that the following examples are for references purposes. You are urged to use your own creativity and innovation to design the application.
- AY2019-2020 Term 1 Project
- AY2020-2021 Term 1
Getting Started with Quarto
- Downloading and installing the latest version of R
- Downloading and installing the latest version of RStudio (if you have yet to do so!)
- Visit this link.
- Downloading and installing Quarto (if you have yet to do so!)
- Visit this link to download Quarto installer.
- Installing git
- Download git at this link and install in your computer.
- Register with github
- visit this link and create a github account.
- Connecting git with RStudio
- Visit this link for instruction.
- Signing up at Netlify
- visit this link and signing up with Netlify.
- Installing usethis R package with RStudio.
- Solving git(GitHub) token issue (optional)
- Refer to this article if encountered git and gitHub credential issue when you need to connect a local repo with GitHub.