Final Project

Final Project

A. Overview

The goal of the Final Project is for you to put together what you’ve learned in the course to develop a spatial database that solves a problem of your own choosing. You may choose to attack your problem using either a Postgres/PostGIS approach or an Esri geodatabase approach.

A database’s usefulness is dependent on how well it helps to solve the problem it was built to address. Typically, a database serves as the "back end" of some sort of application which could be centered around a map or not, and could be web-based or not. We haven’t covered how to build such applications and this project’s timeline is fairly short, so I can’t require you to do much in terms of applying your database to your problem. However, what I will ask you to do is some combination of the following:

• Build and share with me some of the queries that would be useful in the context of your problem and that your database would support.
• Create a map that draws upon data from your database.
• Describe the "front-end" application that you would build on top of your database if you had the time and/or programming skills to do so. You may want to include drawings or other visual aids.

  Note:

  Those of you who have skills in this area and would like the extra challenge are welcome to put together a front-end application (such as an ArcGIS Server or OpenLayers web map). Just be sure to complete the project’s minimum requirements before getting bogged down in something more advanced.

B. Deliverables

This project is two weeks in length. Please refer to the Canvas Calendar for the due date.

Submit your write-up in Word or PDF format to the Final Project. Your write-up should contain the following sections:

• A description of the problem that your database will help to solve
• Documentation of the database you created, including descriptions of your database’s tables, the columns within the tables and the relationships between the tables. An ER diagram and/or screen captures may be effective ways to convey this information.
• A demonstration of how your database solves the problem using some combination of the ideas suggested above.

  Your submission will be graded as follows:

• Quality of the database (the extent to which it solves the problem and follows sound design principles): 80 of 100 points
• Quality of write-up, in terms of grammar, spelling, and flow: 20 of 100 points