In these short video tutorials you will follow one of our instructors to learn about Map Features, and how to set up in EarthRanger admin.
Introduction to Map Features
Learn how to create, organize, and customize map features in EarthRanger to enhance geospatial data visualization. This guided demo introduces you to map features, hierarchy levels, and tools for managing spatial data effectively.
Transcript:
Hello, welcome to the EarthRanger guided demos. My name is Camila, and today I will guide you through a demonstration of map features in EarthRanger. This will be a series of short videos demonstrating how to create, organize, and customize map features in EarthRanger. The goal is to enhance the presentation and visualization of geospatial data, ensuring that the information is clear and accurately reflects your geospatial data management in your platform.
We'll cover the following points in this demo. In the first section that you see in this video, we'll have an introduction to map features. In the second section, you'll learn about the hierarchy levels of organization, which includes display categories, feature classes, and features. In section 3, you learn how to add map features to EarthRanger. In these videos, we'll cover two ways to add map features: importing geospatial files and drawing map features in EarthRanger.
Section 4 is focused on map quick links, how to add map quick links to your EarthRanger map. And section 5 is related to feature groups. Let’s start with the introduction to Map Features. The map features are basically all the geospatial data you want to visualize in your EarthRanger map. They are customizable, and after adding the information to the platform, you can see the list of features on the left side of the screen, in the section called map layers.
This section presents not only the features but all the information visible on the EarthRanger map. It can include Events, Subjects, Analyzers at the bottom, and the central point of this guided demo, the features. I will turn the other layers off for better visualization of the features for this demo. The geospatial data can include vectorial data in three different formats: points, lines, and polygons.
This information can be organized at a hierarchical structure in EarthRanger. There are three levels of hierarchy: display categories, feature classes, and features. These names are all customizable. The display categories are the higher level of organization corresponding to the most comprehensive levels. They are groupings of layers. They appear as drop-down folders in the features section.
Inside the display categories, you can have multiple feature classes. The feature classes are drop-down subfolders inside the display category folders. They correspond to the layers. Finally, inside the feature classes, you can have the features, which are the geospatial elements themselves. There are many ways to organize the map features using the hierarchy levels. The most common one is organizing them by type of information.
For example, here we have a display category for the boundaries, another one for the points of interest, and another one for the roads. Inside the roads, we have two different feature classes: one for the secondary roads with this feature and another one for the primary roads with this feature. Here you can see two other examples of organizing map features in EarthRanger using the display categories and feature classes.
As you can see, there is no specific rule for the way you organize them. The most important thing is that the organization must accurately reflect your spatial data management and work for your needs. In the next videos, you will learn how to create, organize, and manage each one of these levels using the EarthRanger administrator interface. I hope you enjoy!
Map Features Hierarchy
In this video, you’ll learn how to organize and configure map features in EarthRanger.
Key Topics Covered:
00:00:06 – Introduction to the hierarchy of map features (Display Categories, Feature Classes, Features).
00:00:55 – How to configure Display Categories in the Admin Interface.
02:58:00 – Managing Individual Features and their properties.
03:43:00 – Demo: Creating a new Feature Class with custom icons.
04:45:00 – Previewing and saving configurations for real-world use.
Transcript:
Hello, welcome to the second video of the map features guided demo. In this video, you will learn about the levels of organization of map features in EarthRanger. In the previous video, you learned how to find the map features in the EarthRanger operators interface. We also mentioned that there are many possible ways to organize the map features in EarthRanger using the hierarchy levels of organization. In this video, you will learn how to manage the levels of organization of map features using the EarthRanger administrators interface. The administrator's interface is the place where you can configure everything that is visible on the operator's interface. So let's start with the demo.
There are three levels of organizations for map features in EarthRanger: the display categories, the feature classes, and the features. We will start with the display categories. I am using a demonstration site for this guided demo. Do you remember the site I showed you when I was showing how to find the features in EarthRanger map? This is the administrator's interface of that site. To find the map features configurations, you must scroll down to the section called Map Layers. This section includes everything you need for the map features configuration.
For the display categories configurations, you can click on display categories. It will open a list of all existing display categories of a site. Some display categories are created by default in all EarthRanger sites. Please note that if a display category is included in this list, it doesn't mean it necessarily will be visible on the map features list. It’s only visible if the feature classes inside the display category are visible and if there are features included in the feature classes.
Now let's talk about the Feature Classes. The Feature Classes are the second level of organization. They are groupings of similar spatial features. For example, rivers, lakes, villages, ranger camps. There are two important points about the Feature Classes: The first one is that each feature class can contain only one type of geometry (points, lines, or polygons). The second point is that the presentation configuration is defined by feature classes. All the features inside the same Feature Class will have the same configurations for color, stroke, transparency, and icons.
Finally, the Features are the individual geospatial elements. They can represent key areas, roads, points of interest, or anything else you want to visualize in the EarthRanger map. In the next video, you will learn how to add Features to EarthRanger by importing or drawing them. I hope you enjoyed.
