An online mapping project (from 2017) has been tabled until Norwich Trails have means to properly support it and present it to the public. The new Norwich Trails web site may eventually facilitate that goal, but until then we are able to access an early Beta version of the map, which is useful for exploring the possibilities.
Click through to access the current online map version (in a separate browser tab).
This online map is available thanks to the efforts of a Norwich Trails Committee volunteer, who has kept the map available for viewing at an ESRI (online mapping software) account. When viewing the map, one can try out a lot of different settings (some of which are listed below), but one cannot save any changes.
Map intro (and a few things to try):
- There is a toolbar below the “Norwich Trails Beta” map title. Two of these are functionally useful for viewer (the rest are available only to the account owner). You can click on the Details toolbar item to hide or show the Details panel which is on the left of the map.
- The Details pane lets you manipulate many attributes of the viewed map. There is a slider control on the right edge of the pane, which allows it to be resized. Details actually consists of 3 sub-panes: About, Content and Legend. Legend is what you see by default, and provides some (fairly cryptic) help about the map symbology. About provides some general information about the online mapping project. Content controls how some underlying data is rendered on the map. We will dig into some of these capabilities, but first we need to review a couple of additional high-level notions.
- The map itself consists of a Basemap plus a number of distinct, data-driven overlays (called layers). The current Basemap is “Imagery”, which is a satellite view of the Norwich area. Clicking on the Basemap Toolbar item shows a palette of Basemap choices. Select a few – which are most useful?
- Layers – there are 8 of them, the key ones are Trails, Core Areas and Touch Parcels. The others are less useful for now. Clicking the checkboxes enable or disable the viewing of each layer. Try it – a good one to disable is the WaterAreas layer, as it’s not particularly useful.
- Switch back to the Legend pane, which may make more sense now that the layers being rendered have been introduced.
Interesting layer manipulations to try (TODO):
- General layer attributes (transparency, legend, backing data).
- Core areas
- Touch Parcels
- Trails
Norwich Trails 