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Nov 19, 2024

Mapping the University of Botswana - Improving ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World

By Shane Matthews

The University of Botswana’s sprawling campus has always been a challenge to navigate. Buildings are not arranged according to any order, therefore students, guests and even faculty members of the university often struggle to find the locations of lecture halls and classrooms, labs, and essential services. The struggle to navigate the campus would have continued if it were not for Dr. Pelane-Modutlwe Lillian and a small group of students who decided to build a useful campus basemap that would serve everyone.

Dr. Pelane-Modutlwe Lillian recruited a group of third-year students from the Department of Environmental Science in the Faculty of Science. This project was completed through the Living and Learning Communities Academic Mentorship Program.

The Living and Learning Communities Academic Mentorship Program integrates academic achievement with co-curricular programs by emphasizing learning outside the classroom. I provide guidance, support, and advise students. I identified a group of students to mentor so that they could improve their skills and knowledge in GIS and create a useful and much needed campus basemap.
University of Botswana
Dr. Pelane-Modutlwe Lillian

Before the project began, extensive planning was undertaken to ensure its success. The first step was defining the overall goal of the project. The next step was organizing the resources such as software tools, and lots of practice.

The tool used was Esri’s Community Maps Editor, the transformation – a game changer!

Click the card below to read their story and see what is next for the University of Botswana.

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mapping sharing and collaboration arcgis content arcgis online community editor app community maps program living atlas of the world arcgis living atlas arcgis online

Shane Matthews

Shane is a Senior Product Engineer for Esri's ArcGIS Content Team. He curates and recruits content for the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World through Esri's Community Maps Program, and explores and implements new and innovative delivery methods of providing geospatial information.

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Anonymous
April 26, 2021 6:12 am

I am trying to implement this for my Org. I have followed along up until the configuration of the dashboard – step 5. How do I change the dashboard over to my own set of tables? Is it best to edit the json of the dashboard and replace the sample item id’s with my set? Also – to get the notebook to work – I had to comment out availble credits and assigned credits from the User Admin section of the notebook. Is this configured assuming we have turned on credit budgeting for the users – and if we haven’t… Read more »

Anonymous
April 23, 2021 8:32 am

Great stuff! We built a very similar dashboard and process for my company. We even made a StoryMap about it (Link below) . Dashboards are such a powerful tool that it can be used for non-spatial solutions as well.
Make an Item Report Dashboard (Public StoryMap): https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/136db4d3aaa84151be594b496f423a52

Colin Campbell(@colin-campbellrspb-org-uk_rspbeu)
January 16, 2023 5:48 am

This is really useful – thank you. Having set it up it up for our organisation’s account I’ve noticed a possible issue with the ‘FS Storage’ counter (and maybe some of the total credit measures used in other bits of the dashboard). The total number credits per month given in the FS Storage counter is much higher (almost 2x) than our total monthly credits usage as given by the ‘Overview’ tab in the ‘Organisation’ section of ArcGIS Online (which I’d consider to be the correct/definitive figure). Having had a bit of a search around, I’m wondering if it’s because the… Read more »

Calvin Kwon(@ckwon)
January 17, 2023 4:49 am
Reply to  Colin Campbell

Hi Colin, thank you for the note. You are correct on the limitation. Attachments on fs storage is calculated differently, but the script currently does not account for that. When this script was originally developed, I didn’t take into account for your scenario. Having said that, this will be a useful note to share with the community so we understand the limitation. I will make sure to put this in. There should be a way to do this in the script (AGOL does it after all :)) If you (or anyone in the community) develop an enhancement for this –… Read more »

Bernie Connors(@geonb_bernie)
September 14, 2023 7:12 am

The notebook populates three tables:

  1. items
  2. users
  3. feature layers

But the instructions for updating the dashboard only requires changing the IDs for two of the tables. The user table does not appear to be used by the Dashboard. Is that correct?

Nour Salam(@nsalamjmt-com_jmt)
August 23, 2024 12:50 pm

Bonnie and Calvin: this is an excellent article! I am working on applying it for my organization. There is no longer an option to choose ArcGIS Notebook Python 3 Standard – 4.0. Instead, I can choose between 7.0 and 10.0. What would be causing that? @Calvin Kwon

Olivier Jobin(@oljo_rtc)
February 18, 2025 1:47 pm

I’m trying to implement this for my organisation and when running the notebook for the first (and subsequent) times, I get the following error :

dest_fl.delete_features(where="1=1")
Exception: 
This operation is not supported.
(Error Code: 400)

I run this on ArcGIS Notebook Python 3 Standard – 11.0.

Benjamin Hostetler(@hostebxmtf_wisdot)
March 27, 2025 1:25 pm
Reply to  Olivier Jobin

I have this same error. Any insight on resolving?

Paul Steeves(@paul-steevesottawa-ca)
February 25, 2025 12:21 pm

Excellent article! Exactly the item management solution we were looking for for our open data portal.

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