Assignment 1 Cemetery Mapping

A cemetery can be a very difficult place to map.  Especially because some headstones have been broken, weathered, and some are even missing.  These are just a few of the challenges faced when given the duty of mapping in a cemetery.  With these missing pieces it can make the task of mapping even more difficult.  This is because there is nothing to base your map on.  There is no knowledge of if what you created is indeed accurate or not.  Knowing this, a map will be created marking areas that currently have graves and a little information about the person buried there.  For example, their name, birth and death dates, gender, type of headstone, and the condition or presence of a headstone.

Using GIS a map can be made to accurately depict the areas that are suitable for burials.  This information will be very useful for the Hadleyville cemetery.  If a attribute table is made, we could take an aerial image to create an interactive map giving the information about the person buried in each site.  Some of the things to include in the attribute table would be name, gender, age, type of headstone, and the condition of the headstone.  Using all of this information we can generate a map that shows if you were to click on a certain area in the aerial view, it would show all of this as an interactive map.  A UAV will be used to very precisely take an overhead image to use as a back drop.  All of the tools used will be extremely precise.  This could be very helpful to keep track of who is buried in a certain cemetery and possibly how long they have been there.  Since some of the areas do not have headstones ground penetrating radar could be used to see if someone has indeed been buried in this location.  This could prevent selling a part of land that is already being used.  All of this technology would be useful in getting a complete map of a cemetery.  This method will be very time consuming and will use many resources.  This may not be the most efficient way to map this area, but it will be very accurate.  Using these tools, a very precise and intricate map would result.