Maps That Change Quickly: Honolulu Lei Drop-off Sites

Photo courtesy U.S. Navy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnavy/7301706022/

May 24, 2013  Honolulu, Hawaii

Driving in to work today, I heard on Hawaii Public Radio that the City and County of Honolulu was seeking 50,000 donated lei to be used as part of Memorial Day services. This is something the City does every year to decorate the graves of fallen service members at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl and the Hawaii State Veterans Cemetery in Kaneohe.

The Mayor's Memorial Day Ceremony at Punchbowl will be held on Monday, May 27th at 8:30 am. Here's a link with more information on that event:

     Mayor's Memorial Day Ceremony 2013

Lists are good, maps are better!

At the end of the story on the radio, the announcer listed a number of locations on Oahu where donated lei could be dropped off. If you've read some of my other blog posts you've have heard me say it before - "lists are good, maps are better". A list provides basic information which is better to have than no information at all, but when it is a list of locations, a map is so much better. It is much easier for people to see a map and then find a location near them.

So I decided to turn the list into a map. But I didn't have much time. The locations were only open one day, this day, May 24th, in the morning. Some closed at noon, some at 1 pm and the rest closed at 2 pm. So I had to work fast. Here's what I did.

List of locations to map features

There were three types of drop off locations - fire stations, parks and park offices. There were a number of ways I could use to turn the list of locations into features on a map. I could work from a spreadsheet, but I knew that most of the locations were already in GIS format and available as different map services from the City and County of Honolulu so I decided to work in ArcGIS for Desktop. I created a template shapefile, brought in the different map services, selected the features I needed and copied them into my shapefile, and then edited the attributes - basically the name of the location and the hours it was open.  Here are links to the two map services I used:

     Honolulu Fire Stations

     Honolulu Parks

Map features to web map

The next step was to add my shapefile map features to a basemap to create a web map. I used ArcGIS Online to create the web map including setting symbology (a flag at each location - this is for Memorial Day after all) and configuring the popup window to show the name and hours information. I saved my web map and gave it this description:

The description is important because in the next step I will use a template to create a mapping application. The template will present this description information on the left side of the map.

Web map to mapping application

In ArcGIS Online there are a variety of application templates available. I choose to use one called the "Basic Viewer" template. I turned off many of the tools in order to keep the application simple. I set the logo in the lower right hand corner to point to a City and County of Honolulu logo and saved my application configuration.  here's what it looked like:

You can see above how the text from the description was incorporated on the left side of the mapping application. The flags marked each of the drop-off locations.  

Clicking on a flag showed the name and hours for that location as shown above.

Time to share

All the above data editing, web map creation and map application configuration took about an hour from start to finish. During that hour, only I could see my web map and mapping application, but now that it was ready, I set the sharing property for both to "Everyone" which means anyone with internet access can see my mapping application. Time to send out a tweet...

Time to change the map!

The fire stations stopped accepting lei donations at noon. The parks stopped at 1 pm, and offices at Fasi Municpal Building and Kapolei Hale stopped at 2 pm. This information was in the popup window for each location, but I wanted to make the map more dynamic. If someone opened my mapping application after 12 noon, I wanted them to quickly be able to see only the locations which were still open - the parks and offices.  And if they opened my mapping application after 1 pm they'd only see the two offices.

So how could I quickly change my mapping application? It turns out to be pretty simple. Because my mapping application uses my web map, all I had to do was change and save my web map and the mapping application would update automatically. This loose coupling of web maps and mapping applications had worked well for me before with my electioneering app in the General Election of  2012 and it worked well again.

At noon I went in to my web map and changed the symbology for the fire stations from a flag to a light orange dot. At 1 pm I did the same for the parks, and at 2 pm I did the same for the two offices.  It worked great, it was very easy to do, and it made the maps easier to read.  

At 2 pm, when all the locations had closed, I called the City and County of Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation to confirm that all the locations had closed.  They informed me that one site was still open, that donated lei could be dropped off through the weekend at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.  Thus, for the final change to my map, I changed the basemap from streets to imagery and only showed one location, Punchbowl. I also changed the web map description to reflect the new information - which was automatically used by the template.  Here's the final mapping application:

I suspect there are many times when this ability to quickly change the features on a map will prove useful.  I'm on the lookout for more opportunities.  If you have an idea, let me know!