Sofiya: The Social Science professor

Profile

Sofiya is a tenured History professor. She has extensive experience working with archival material, but little motivation to learn how to use digital geospatial tools as she is nearing retirement.

Story

As a historical researcher and seminar instructor, I am looking for an intuitive, quick, and non-technical tool for finding historical maps by place and time.

Scenario

I have used the geoportal to find digitized South Asian maps for my research and lecture slides. By using the map search option in combination with the date facet, I can easily locate maps from a specific geographic area and time period.

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Hannah: The busy, tech-savvy undergrad

Profile

Hannah is a third year undergraduate student with a heavy course load. She is taking her second GIS course and is looking to get more experience with using geospatial tools and data.

Story

As an undergraduate student, I am looking for a one-stop shop for finding public geospatial data.

Scenario

I needed to complete an assignment for my Advanced GIS course quickly. The deliverable was a map of Wisconsin and Illinois featuring highways, parks, lakes, and terrain. I used the geoportal to search by state and found all of these datasets. This saved me time from having to search through DOT and DNR GIS websites for both states.

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Lee: The advanced researcher

Profile

Lee is a graduate student studying hydrology. They regularly use GIS applications for spatial analysis.

Story

As someone who evaluates a great deal of data, I am looking for a more efficient way to preview items online before downloading them.

Scenario

My research is focused on the Great Lakes. The agency that publishes bathymetry for the lakes provides the data as downloadable shapefiles hosted on a file server. They don’t have previewable metadata, so I have to download each item, unzip it, and load it into a desktop GIS application to determine what attributes are present. With the geoportal, I can preview a visualization of the dataset and select features to see what the attribute table contains. I can also preview the metadata from right within the item page.

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Edgar: The librarian

Profile

Edgar is a Geography Liaison at a University Library. He is an experienced GIS user and regularly consults with students to help them find data for research projects.

Story

As a liaison who regularly works with researchers, I want a catalog of local public GIS data that features a spatial search.

Scenario

As a librarian, I would like to be able to use a more responsive search interface for materials in our collections. Our institution uses an outdated platform for our digital collections. I am directing students to the geoportal to search for our unique collection of maps. This will also provide better discoverability for this unique collection for researchers at other Big Ten Universities.

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Scott: The data provider

Profile

Scott is a GIS Professional in a small county in Ohio. He began using GIS in 1993, years before online data sharing was possible.

Story

As an employee of an agency with limited funding, I am glad to know there is an external organization that is willing to add value to our public data with metadata and up-to-date sharing platforms.

Scenario

I support the idea of open data in general, but we only have time to fulfill the basic county mandate to make our GIS data publicly available. We don’t have the resources in my department to spend time improving our county’s GIS website, so having our data indexed in the Geoportal makes it easier for people to find

I also have a great deal of historical GIS data that I store on a hard drive. My county website only allows me to publish the most recent versions of the data, but I would like to make the historical versions available somewhere.

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Compiled by the User Personas and Stories Working Group June 29, 2018 - September 6, 2018