Notes from OSB visit, 3 Oct 2008

I accompanied Prof. Amy Lobben to Oregon School for the Blind (OSB) in Salem Friday, along with a geography student who is gathering raw data for the OSB map using a GPS unit. We met primarily with Bob Disher, Technology Specialist at OSB. Here are a few notes on that visit and what I learned.

The OSB campus is smaller than University of Oregon campus, and the map will be quite a bit simpler, with fewer layers (classes of object). Objects to be included in the map include at least the following:

• Buildings
• Some rooms within buildings
  
  • Auditorium, media center, main office, infirmary, dining hall
• Some main doors to outside
• Parking lot
• Sidewalks
• Campfire pit (a meeting place)
• Sensory garden (as a single object)
• Major features of the immediately surrounding area
  
  • Cross streets
  • Intersections

An interesting issue that came up, and one that has not been considered in our soundscape map work to date, is representing attributes like incline (slope) and the width of sidewalks. I'll make a separate post about that.

In discussions about longer term trajectory for the project, Bob asked about producing maps from data that is not in a geographic information system, e.g., from a plan of a building that is in terms of relative positions but not referenced to lattitude and longitude. This seems conceptually straightforward (it really shouldn't matter to us whether the coordinate system is degrees or feet, or where the origin is), but it does suggest that our earlier discussion about not tying our input data format too tightly to a fixed GIS data source is in fact relevant.

In a separate discussion with Amy, on the way to Salem, I asked whether we should be considering GIS systems other than those of ESRI (the company that makes ArcGIS). Amy said that, while GIS systems sometimes do provide some limited interoperability by reading other data formats, in practice ESRI dominates the field so strongly that supporting ESRI formats is enough for handing pretty much all GIS data we are likely to encounter.

The meeting was quite loosely structured, and in addition to needs for the current project, we discussed the way the project has evolved and the way it involves students. Bob Disher extended an invitation for us to visit OSB as a group. I'll write a separate post to discuss that possibility.