Sharing GIS

This week we had to learn how to share maps online via different methods. The principle methods involved ArcGIS online (with an ESRI) account.

For the project, we had to use a personal top 10. I went with the top 10 mountain hikes in Taiwan. I'm a big hiker and I really love the hiking there. I was also impressed at how big mountains are in Taiwan, given that Taiwan is a fairly small island country. Many tower over 10,000 feet, the highest, Yushan mountain, stands at appox. 12,000 plus feet. Most of the mountains I have hiked before except two, which are on the to do list.

For starters we had to create an excel file that would be converted to a txt file. Since I was going with mountain peaks (they don't have street addresses) I went with lat and long except the one mountain hike that does have a street address, the 4 beasts in Taipei. There was a lot of trouble shooting. Initially, I had an excel file with the elevation and lat and long. However, the format when converted to txt wouldn't work on the ArcGIS online map. So I created new tables with one for lat and one for long, I converted those coordinates to decimal degrees and that worked, however, it wouldn't convert the street address, so I created a separate txt file and added it. It became another layer. In ArcDesktop, when making the layers for the package and google earth, I merged those layers using the merge tool.

I created the online map with my dots. I then created the ArcPackage. I used mountain icons in the symbology. 4 of the mountains are all clustered near each other, so no matter the scale, I couldn't make them clear without either making the icons very small or excluding other mountains, so I created an insert that used the extent. I did the extent in reverse and used a leader line to connect the insert.

Then exporting the package was easy. I then created a kml file use the kml conversion tool. After the mountain layer was converted, it was a matter of simply drag and drop.

Here is a link to my ArcGIS online map: http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=cf263bdbd2bd43d7be72521d7588c505

This is me in front of Snow Mountain Taiwan (in the background).