Kelsey Yoder-Ostroski's Portfolio of Geographic Information Science

My name is Kelsey Yoder-Ostroski and I am a new(er) student in the world of GIS. This is my sixth class in UWF's GIS Admin graduate program as a full-time student. At the moment I am a caregiver to our kids but I also do volunteer work with a nonprofit providing support to local parents. We are a military family; we have lived in the Navarre area for 3.5 years and are preparing to move to Germany this fall. I'm not ready for the cold! I am originally from Texas so I love the heat, but we can't wait to see everything Germany and its neighbors have to offer.  In my free time, I enjoy learning German, baking (mostly breads), or doing home improvement projects. I have a weakness for cookies and power tools.  I am pursuing a master's in GIS business administration because I love how applicable and versatile it is. It literally encompasses every topic on Earth from the land to its resources and to all of history. I'm not 100% sure what I will do after graduating but I am ...

  For this week's assignment, we were tasked with exporting select attributes of a feature class from the shapefile to a TXT file. We needed the X and Y coordinates of the feature's vertices as well as the corresponding object (point) ID, vertex ID, and name. A flowchart and pseudocode were first produced to aid in problem-solving. I generalized the tasks in the flowchart so I could focus more on the final code's structure. Then, I added more details (such as variable names) in the pseudocode. My biggest obstacles included using the wrong cursor type for the desired task (which I blame on late-night coding), small syntactical errors such as open parenthesis, and not realizing that the write.method inputs referred to the cursor parameters and not to the attributes in the shapefile.  As you can see from the output, there is an enormous amount of data being extracted from the feature. Python (and coding languages) provide methods for handling the vast amount of information tha...

  We continued expanding our knowledge of Python this week by incorporating two new functions: Describe() and ListFeatureClasses(). These allow us to explore data, which can then be manipulated using cursors and dictionaries. We were tasked with a multi-step project to: (1) copy a global database into a new database, (2) print the cities classified as county seats and the corresponding population, (3) and create a dictionary containing this information. A flowchart, as seen below, helps elucidate each step of the process. The output of the script can be seen below. Adding messages before and after each task aids in readability.

Modeling is a valuable tool for creating a visual guide for sequencing geoprocessing tasks. Laying out step-by-step visuals aids in problem-solving, creates solid code, and results in tools that can help other GIS analysts.  ArcGIS Pro incorporates visualization with ModelBuilder. Even though the geoprocessing sequence can be elaborate, using ModelBuilder provides a clean, organized workspace to visualize the entire process. A sample ModleBuilder from Esri We built upon our geoprocessing knowledge by writing our own Python scripts. For our assignment, we needed to create a script that would add XY coordinate points to a point shapefile of Austin area hospitals. Then the updated file needed a 1000 meter buffer with dissolve. Finally, we need the script to return a print message confirming each function was executed. The final outputs are pictured below.    Creating a flowchart in ModelBuilder was a helpful way to visualize each step. The biggest challenge I had this week w...