INST0029 Assessment details
INST0029 2018/19
Oliver Duke-Williams & Antonis Bikiakis
Overall task
You must create a website that contains a map implemented using the Javascript library leaflet.js, as directed through the weekly practical classes. The map should display a data set of your own choosing.
You are also required to write a concise report reflecting on the task, identifying problems that you encountered, justifying decisions made, and commenting on ways in which the site could be improved.
Additionally, you will need to upload a zipfile containing the PHP code and Javascript etc that you have created.
This task contributes to 100% of the student grade for this module.
Plagiarism
The assessed project must be your own work. You may include any code included in the weekly practical class examples. You should not seek assistance from outside parties, including posting questions on support forums such as Stack Overflow. If you have technical queries, then these should be raised in questions to the Moodle discussion forum for this module.
Third party libraries (such as jQuery) may be used if you wish. The report should make clear where this has been done.
Deadline: work must be submitted by 2pm, Wednesday 1 May 2019
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Project requirements
Requirements – website
The site should contain (at least one) interactive map built using leaflet.js, which should exhibit the characteristics described below. The guidelines below are intended to allow flexibility in the way that you deliver the goals of the assessment: there are a variety of ways in which a solution might be implemented, including ways that we will not cover in the weekly practical classes.
The web page(s) containing the map must be hosted on the server used for this module – wwwdis.ucl.ac.uk
There are two suggested datasets that have been made available, with illustrations of how to load the data, and notes about the content. You are also welcome to use datasets of your own suggestion. If you use your own data you are advised to ask one of the course tutors to confirm that they are suitable.
The map should contain at least one overlay layer displaying a dataset of interest. These overlays might include:
1) Point location data. These could be presented as either a set of default or customised ‘pin’ markers, or some other symbol (for example, a circle or other shape)
2) Area data – the map will feature a set of overlay polygons
3) Image overlay (but see note)
The web page should also include an HTML form element, which is used to provide one or more ways of searching or filtering the data, and this should lead to the map being updated.
Use of a single image overlay is thus unlikely to achieve this ‘searchability’ goal, although the selection of one or a subset of multiple alternative overlays might be an appropriate implementation.
It is most likely that the data you display will be held within a database table, and that subsets of data will be extracted using SQL queries generated in response to parameters submitted via a web form.
Depending on the nature of the data that is used, the webpage might also contain alternative ways of displaying data, such as tables or graphs.
Requirements – report
The project report should be a maximum of 1000 words. It must include the primary URL for your assessed work. Should there be any further information required to use your site (for example, a login name1) this should also be given. The report should reflect on what you have learned during the module, and should describe problems that you encountered in the development of the site. You should also identify ways in which the site might be improved, perhaps including additional capabilities, or features that you were not able to implement as fully as you might have wished.
1 You should not include your standard username or password! 2
Requirements – code
You are also required to upload a zip file containing code that you have developed as part of the project. You are free to use code included as part of the weekly practical sessions in your work; this should be included in the upload file. You should include HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS files as appropriate. Should you have very large data files or boundary sets to upload, please contact o.duke-williams@ucl.ac.uk
Assessment criteria
Criteria
Notes
Page and code quality Is the page implemented in HTML that conforms to standards? NB – this also includes HTML produced as the output of PHP scripts. [The correctness of HTML will be primarily assessed using the ‘HTML
Validator’ add-on for Chrome and Firefox]
Does the page render correctly? It will be tested in one or more of the browsers Firefox, Chrome, and Edge. Pages should be tested in more than one browser. Should your site exhibit rendering issues such that it ‘works’ in one browser but not another, please make this clear in your report.
Is the code well written? Is it well documented? A standard expectation is that code should be laid out and commented so that it is easy to read. A lower standard piece of work might contain code without comments and laid out such that it is actively hard to read and understand.
Does the site have additional technical features of note? A higher standard piece of work might have code elements that are implemented in an elegant manner, and feature uses of PHP and of the leaflet library that go beyond the features covered in the weekly practical classes.
Page content Basic requirements: does the page contain an interactive map? Does the map have data overlays? Does the map have clickable markers /
features that produce pop-ups with additional information?
Appearance: how are the map and the rest of the page presented?
Does the page have search and/or filter features that allow the data being displayed in subset? Advanced work might have multiple filters, and also to have given consideration to the way that filters interact with each other.
Are there additional features of note? A high quality piece of work may make use of the source data in multiple ways.
Academic style Are all data sets used properly cited? Are there links to original sources?
Does the page text explain the context of the map? Does it set out the purpose of the map or other page content?
Does the page offer any interpretation of patterns seen in the data? A high quality piece of work may engage with the data in the form of explanatory text related to spatial patterns seen or expected, or on the relationship between location and data explored. The exact nature of this will depend strongly on the data that you have chosen to use.
Enagagment with existing work: where relevant, the page might identify or link to other resource or academic research that are relevant to the chosen data.
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Datasets
Datasets have been made available [TO ADD DETAILS OF OPENPLAQUES AND STATS19 DATA]
Requirements
For point-based data, the data will need to be in form of a series of records, containing a latitude- longitude coordinate pair. You may need to convert from an alternative coordinate reference system to latitude-longitude.
It may be the case that you have data that contain a series of street addresses or more general locations. Such data could be geo-coded (a point location found for each address) but you should be aware that this would take additional time and effort. For relatively small data sets, this might be done manually, but for larger data sets an automated process is required.
For area based data, you will probably have data in the form of a set of records with an area identifier (either a name or an alphanumeric code) and a set of attributes. You will also need a set of boundaries that can be used to create an overlay. It is vital that area identifiers are common between the data and the boundaries. Note that in the UK there will often be variations in scope – you may have data about England and Wales, rather than the UK as a whole.
The table below gives a few examples of potential data sources – this will be expanded. Note that these are mostly UK-centric examples – the data that you use does not have to be about the UK!
Road Traffic Accident data https://data.gov.uk/dataset/road-accidents-safety-data
Crime data https://data.police.uk/
Census data http://census.ukdataservice.ac.uk/
Blue plaque locations http://openplaques.org/about/data
Voting data http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/our-work/our- research/electoral-data
Parliamentary petitions data https://petition.parliament.uk/
National data stores Some countries operate data stores providing access to a variety of statistics, such as https://data.gov.uk/
For example: data.gov.au,data.gov.sg,data.gov.in,data.gov.my,data.gov.ie Try data.gov.X for other countries!
London datastore https://data.london.gov.uk/
Both of these offer a large number of datasets, some of which are
geographical (in the sense that the contain distinct records about different places)
World Bank databank http://databank.worldbank.org/data/home.aspx
Data for many international indicators of demographic and
economic development etc
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