In this workshop, we'll learn how to use QGIS to create OpenIndexMaps GeoJSON files that can be used in GeoBlacklight and elsewhere to provide access to a series of maps, aerial photos, or other datasets.
Stephen Appel, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Tom Brittnacher, University of California Santa Barbara
UBC Vancouver Campus – Koerner Library, Digital Scholarship Lab, Room 497.
Bring your own laptop with QGIS installed, or use one of 10 computers in the lab (first-come, first serve).
The QGIS Version 3.28.5 LTR (Firenze) is what we used for planning and what is installed in the computer lab.
Most versions of QGIS will work fine for the limited functionality needed for the workshop.
- Click this link to download and then unzip the data folder to the desktop.
- Alternatively, If you are familiar with Git and GitHub, you can clone
the website repository
to your computer and access the data in the
datadirectory.
We'll start with a bit of background information about:
- Index Maps -- what are they?
- OpenIndexMaps -- a community standard
- GeoJSON -- a spatial data format for the web
- QGIS -- free, open-source desktop GIS software
Then we'll work through various scenarios:
- Exercise 1 -- Create a polygon index map from an existing shapefile
- Exercise 2 -- Create a grid index map from scratch
Finally, we will lead a disussion about future steps, community feedback, and questions.
If you want to try an example using point data from a spreadsheet containing coordinates, you can do the optional exercise:
- Optional Exercise -- Create a point index map from a spreadsheet containing coordinates
This workshop is a fork of a workshop held at Geo4LibCamp, February 3, 2020 by Keith Jenkins, GIS Librarian at Cornell University
https://kgjenkins.github.io/openindexmaps-workshop/
Note that we skipped Excercise 4 from the original workshop, Create a polygon index map using virtual layer magic. We also turned exercise 2 from the original workshop into the optional exercise.