UW Oshkosh - About the Campus Maps

How the Interactive Map was made:
This is a brief and non-technical summary of how the map was generated Step 1, getting the data: Before I talk about the data, I should state that many hours have gone into this project. I would give a conservative estimate of between 3200 and 3300 hours of my life (not including the trial-and-error hours of programming and refinement). However, I am quite proud of the end result. Fortunately, I began with a highly accurate computerized drawing because one of my first projects here, at the university, was to update the campus civil drawings. I was able to bring the drawing into "real world" coordinates with the civil planning software by Autodesk. I assigned points to each corner of each building (multiple points for a curve) and gathered the latitude and longitude (a.k.a. GPS) coordinates to six decimal places for each building. I then repeated this process for each parking lot, (most) sports fields, tennis courts and walkways. Step 2, manipulation: Once all of this data was compiled, I was able to manipulate it using the "Google Map API." Having read through many of the programers' forums and postings, I was rather disapointed to find that there were no examples of other people's projects which had the functionality I was looking for. So, after a number of failed attempts, I finally had a rudamentary map which would grab the data (which I generated in a specific but standard-ish format) from a file I could edit without changing the map's rendering programming. In other words, I wrote some instructions to tell the computers (the ones that send info to your computer over the interweb) to use a bunch of numbers in another file to draw lines, shapes and other things on top of the normal Google Map. On the right of the map display, I added a side-bar of icons and check-boxes which can be turned on and off. I'm afraid that, since I am the only one doing any of this work and my workload is already pretty full, many of the recent construction projects have not been added to this map... nor have any parking lot updates, emergency phone locations, AED locations, computer lab hours, bike rack locations, etc. Step 3, what's next? I'm currently updating the map to use Google Map API v3 I am trying to add public tranit lines I hope to have "walking directions" enabled in the next update

How the Interactive Map was made:

This is a brief and non-technical summary of how the map was generated

Step 1, getting the data:

Before I talk about the data, I should state that many hours have gone into this project. I would give a conservative estimate of between 3200 and 3300 hours of my life (not including the trial-and-error hours of programming and refinement). However, I am quite proud of the end result.
Fortunately, I began with a highly accurate computerized drawing because one of my first projects here, at the university, was to update the campus civil drawings. I was able to bring the drawing into "real world" coordinates with the civil planning software by Autodesk. I assigned points to each corner of each building (multiple points for a curve) and gathered the latitude and longitude (a.k.a. GPS) coordinates to six decimal places for each building. I then repeated this process for each parking lot, (most) sports fields, tennis courts and walkways.

Step 2, manipulation:

Once all of this data was compiled, I was able to manipulate it using the "Google Map API." Having read through many of the programers' forums and postings, I was rather disapointed to find that there were no examples of other people's projects which had the functionality I was looking for. So, after a number of failed attempts, I finally had a rudamentary map which would grab the data (which I generated in a specific but standard-ish format) from a file I could edit without changing the map's rendering programming. In other words, I wrote some instructions to tell the computers (the ones that send info to your computer over the interweb) to use a bunch of numbers in another file to draw lines, shapes and other things on top of the normal Google Map.
On the right of the map display, I added a side-bar of icons and check-boxes which can be turned on and off. I'm afraid that, since I am the only one doing any of this work and my workload is already pretty full, many of the recent construction projects have not been added to this map... nor have any parking lot updates, emergency phone locations, AED locations, computer lab hours, bike rack locations, etc.

Step 3, what's next?

I'm currently updating the map to use Google Map API v3
I am trying to add public tranit lines
I hope to have "walking directions" enabled in the next update

Please contact me with any questions or comments about our campus maps.