Congratulations to Kevin Cheriyan for winning the TUgis 2019 MAP-APP COMPETITION! Kevin is currently a student in our MS GIS program.  This competition illustrates both the importance of design for the visual display of geospatial information and highlights web-based mapping applications. 

Kevin created a web mapping application called CartoLingo, which was his final project in Dr. Elle Lim's Web Programming course. The premise behind CartoLingo is that accurate knowledge of languages spoken in any given region or community is incredibly valuable to many people. This includes first responders and Federal emergency management personnel who depend on such information to know which languages to distribute aid materials in preparation for natural disaster events. It is also helpful for academic researchers in Sociology and Linguistics who want to understand a community's spoken languages better before doing field studies.

CartoLingo tries to make this information readily available to learn and use by having members of any community submit data about languages that they hear on a frequent basis around them. Users can draw polygons on the provided webmap and submit a form with basic information about the for which area they are submitting. Once the data is submitted, it can be viewed in the site along with data other users have submitted.
 

To build this full-stack application, Kevin utilized several tools he learned in Dr. Lim's course. He used HTML/CSS/JavaScript to build out the site's appearance and features, Leaflet and ESRI's Leaflet plugins for mapping, PostgreSQL database to store user-submitted data and PHP to manage connections to it. Kevin also used style guides provided by Bootstrap and ESRI's Calcite to give the application a polished look. 

To see the code used for CartoLingo and visit the app, see his github repo here: https://github.com/Cesium133/cartolingo