Mini Project #1: Map and Digitize My Neighbourhood

The idea for this project started when my mother was frequently in and out of the hospital. During that time, many relatives and neighbours came to visit, and I realised how little I actually knew about the people living around me. Although I had lived there for years, I couldn’t even name most of the nearby households. The last time I remembered visiting nearby houses was when I was in 4th grade of elemenatry. Since then, new homes have been built, new families have moved in, and the landscape has changed significantly. This inspired me to start a small personal project: to map and digitise my neighbourhood. I wanted to reconnect with my surroundings while applying the geospatial skills I had learned professionally.

So here what did I do 

I began by searching for a suitable basemap and decided to use a satellite image in PDF format (the only up-to-date data available at that time). I aligned this image with the default OpenStreetMap layer in QGIS through a georeferencing process.

This step was quite challenging because the area is still covered by dense vegetation, making it difficult to identify clear ground control points. Fortunately, the printed map contained latitude and longitude lines. Although there were only two intersections, they were extremely useful when combined with several recognisable landmarks. In total, I used (only) four reference points to achieve accurate alignment.

yap this is the view of my village. still green right?

Anyway, I did the geo-referencing twice because the image was still blurry when I tried to digitise it.

Once the geo-referencing process was completed, I proceeded to digitise each house within my dusun. Surprisingly, even for such a small area, there were quite a lot of houses, my dusun turned out to be densely populated actually, xixixi . 

To enrich the attribute data, I asked my father for help since he still knows most of our neighbours. With his assistance, I was able to record each household’s name and the number of residents living there. His familiarity with everyone made the process smoother, more accurate, and honestly, kinda fun. So, thanks so much, Be!

The final output was a detailed residential layer representing my neighbourhood’s current settlement pattern. Even though the project was small in scale, it provided an updated spatial snapshot of the area and could serve as a foundational dataset for future community mapping or village planning initiatives. 

Yap that all. It was very simply lovely. 

To make the data more accessible, I later developed a simple WebGIS version of the map. This allows me to view, check, and update the data easily without having to open my laptop or run QGIS every time. It became a convenient way to visualise my neighbourhood dynamically and share the results with others when needed (maybe my nephews or etc).

The example of this project available at this page. For privacy reasons, I anonymized all household information before sharing the WebGIS version publicly by replacing real names and data with numerical codes to protect the identity of my neighbors while still demonstrating the project’s structure and functionality.

Last but not least, through this project, I learned that GIS is deeply connected to everyday life, even at the neighborhood level. I also recognized that one of the greatest challenges in spatial data management is not the lack of data, but rather the lack of integration among existing datasets. This issue is not unique to small communities, it also occurs within government institutions, where valuable spatial data often remains fragmented and underutilized.

This experience strengthened both my technical and critical understanding of GIS. It reminded me that meaningful spatial analysis depends not only on technology, but also on collaboration, local knowledge, and the integration of data systems, principles that I aim to apply in my future academic and professional journey.