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Creating a Cultural Coverage
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Coding the Village Inventory

The goal of the design process for the HTML pages was to integrate all existing cultural resource information for each parcel onto one page. Rather than locating half a dozen maps or obscure reports, planners can view all the information in one place. This is anticipated to be especially useful in evaluating parcels for open space acquisition both by the South Kingstown Planning Department and Land Trust. However, since the Inventory is also designed for use by lay planners and citizens, the layout was intended to be clear and readable. As the members of the Peace Dale group wrote:

There is a considerable amount of technical information about Peace Dale. However, it was not readily available to the group and has not been assembled in a form that would expand citizen access and understanding in the district. (1)

The Inventory is meant to address this problem.

A prototype was developed and presented to the South Kingstown Planning Department and the South Kingstown Land Trust, the expected users of the GIS coverage. The original data for each study was included along with the goals of each report. Although these pages are not intended to be replacements for the original surveys, the background or goals statements allow users to understand the context of each designation. A link to the authoring agency is provided for each study.

screenshot showing original page design

It was suggested that the pages contain information on the type of protection for each parcel — i.e., is the parcel already protected as open space or are there other restrictions on development? An area of the page header was reserved for this information and the design revised.

Final design — a parcel located along Ministerial Road

Overall page design is simple and graphics are minimal to improve loading time. Most pages load in three to six seconds using a 28.8 bps modem. The template for the pages was created with Macromedia's Dreamweaver 4.0. An index at the top of the page lists the studies relating to that parcel. Images of sites were taken from the original studies or clearly labeled with the date photographed. All text contained on the parcel pages comes from the original reports and was edited only for clarity and length. Pages were labeled and saved with the plat-lot code used in the town's tax parcel GIS for accessibility.

For the online inventory, maps were exported from ArcView as .jpg files and parcels were hyperlinked to the same HTML files as the GIS database using hand-drawn hotspot polygons.

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