Title
Hyperlinked Waypoints
Author

Russ Walker
American River College, Geography 350: Data Acquisition in GIS; Fall 2003
Abstract

My project Hyperlinked Waypoints has made me appreciate the power and possibilities of GIS. With a $200. gps receiver and a $50. camera-phone I was able to create something very useful.
Introduction

Water is a very valuable commodity its uses are numerous from irrigation to its use as a solvent, water's value cannot be underestimated however, for a runner facing dehydration and heat exhaustion nothing could be more valuable. Some parts of the world do not get enough water, other parts get too much. In the United States we are fortunate to have such an effective and efficient water storage and delivery system. In virtually any developed portion of America water can be found either in drinking fountains or through some form of irrigation valve. What I intend to do is locate and map all public drinking fountains in my neighborhood of Antelope so that any person from the light jogger to the more dedicated runner will know where water is available in the case of a heat related emergency.
Methods

I determined the source of water or fluids by only mapping those sites accessible to the general public after 3pm or weekends when most people would be out running. I collected the waypoints as near to the source of water as possible, most points are very close to the street. I took a digital picture of the fountain or source so the person would know what they were looking for.
:

Here is a screen shot of the project. This is what the user would see when clicking on a hyperlinked waypoint.

my map
Problems

During the course of this project I ran into several obstacles. The first problem was how to get the pictures fom my camera-phone to ARC. The second Problem was finding a suitable roads layer. And finally how to get my project from the Ethan Way lab to my station in room 152
my other map
Results


my map.jpg
 The code looks like this sorry I can't get the proportions right:

<img src="Hyper.jpg" width="229" height="300" >

(the name of the image file is map_layout3.jpg)
Analysis
This project was enjoyable for several reasons. The first of which was being able to put into practice the things that we learned in class, another cause for enjoyment was things worked the way they were supposed to, and finally I was able to use my Garmin receiver that spends most of its time in the closet. The project was not without some challenges that needed to be overcome. The biggest problem was my roads layer, I must have been looking in the wrong place because I was only able to find data for the entire state. I knew this would not work because the local roads shapefile was 422kb and I was running out of room in my local drive. I tried using the geoprocessing wizard, but even it couldn't handle the size of the file. Finally it occured to me to try to use the select attributes by location option and lo and behold it worked. Once I had a managable layer to work with it was all downhill, when I clicked on the first waypoint and the hyperlinked picture came up I was thrilled.
Conclusions
For this project I chose to collect data for something that interested me, waypoints where a person could find fluids in an emergency situation. While working on this project I realized the value of what I was doing. My exact methods could be used for a variety of other uses, such as adding a picture to some form of wildlife or natural resource application. There could even be a need for this type of project in the business world, where realtors could show properties from the office in order to narrow their clients search.
References
I used the Garmin 12XL to collect waypoints where a public source of drinking water could be found. I used an LG camera-phone with 640x480 pixel resolution to take the photo images used in the hyperlink. I found my roads layer on the CaSil website. And of course none of this would have possible without the use of ArcMap.