4.5 Term Project – Finalizing and Submitting a Project Proposal

This week, you must organize your thinking about the term project by developing your topic/scope from last week into a short proposal.

Submit a brief project proposal (1 page) to the assignment box. This week, you should start to obtain the data you will need for your project. The proposal must identify at least two likely data sources for the project work, since this will be critical to success in the final project. Over the next few weeks, you will be refining your proposal.

Your proposal should include:

Background:

• What is your business question which will benefit from location intelligence?
• Some background on the topic, particularly why it is interesting
• What, specifically, do you hope to find out?
• Geographical scope, scale, and location(s)

Methodology:

• Data: list and discuss the data required to answer the question(s). Be sure to clearly explain the role each dataset will play.
• Be sure to list where you will obtain the required data. This may be public websites or perhaps data that you have access to through work or personal contacts.
  • Obtain and explore the data: attributes, resolutions, scale.
    • Is the data useful or are there limitations?
    • Will you need to clean and organize the data in order to use it?
• Analysis: what you will do with the data, in general terms
  • What sort of statistical analysis and spatial analysis do you intend to carry out? Skim through the lessons to identify the methods you will be using. If you don't know the technical names for the types of analysis you would like to do, then at least try to describe the types of things you would like to be able to say after finishing the analysis (e.g., one distribution is more clustered than another). This will give me and other students a firmer basis for making constructive suggestions about the options available to you. Also, look through the course topics for ideas.

Expected Results:

• What sort of maps or outputs you will create

References:

• References to papers you may have cited in the background or methods section. Include URLs to data sources here (if you didn't include the URLs in the Data section.
• The proposal does not have to be detailed at this stage. Your proposal should be no longer than about 1 page (max.). Make sure that your proposal covers all the above points, so that I (Lesson 3 & 4) and others (Lesson 5 – peer review) evaluating the proposal can make constructive suggestions about additions, changes, other sources of data, and so on.
• Additional writing and formatting guidelines are provided in the document (TermProjectGuidelines.pdf) in 'Term Project Overview ' in Canvas.

Refine your work and post a final proposal to the 'Term Project Discussion' board as plain text.

As you all finalizing your project proposals, consider the following aspects:

• Are the goals reasonable and achievable? It is a common mistake to aim too high and attempt to do too much. Suggest possible amendments to the proposals' aims that might make them more achievable in the time frame.
• Are the data adequate for the task proposed? Do you foresee problems in obtaining or organizing the data? Suggest how these problems could be avoided.
• Are the proposed analysis methods appropriate? Suggest alternative methods or enhancements to the proposed methods that would also help.
• Provide any additional input that you feel is appropriate. This could include suggestions for additional outputs (e.g., maps) not specifically mentioned by the author, or suggestions as to further data sources, relevant things to read, relevant other examples to look at, and so on.
• Begin drafting an Abstract for your project. There are various ways to effectively write an abstract that effectively captures a reader's attention to take the time to read your project, article, or message. We'll discuss several common abstract formats for geospatial analysis writing.

Now ... don't wait for final feedback from the instructor--begin your data gathering now!