HERE Technologies Internship
This internship was a wonderful exposure to the corporate world. It started off with a 2-day training workshop conducted by our mentor and supervisor Ms. Mudrika Shakdwipee. We were taught about the open-source software QGIS, which is used to view, analyze, and edit geospatial data. We were also taught the basics of GPS and remote sensing. Then we loaded the satellite image of my college Bennett University and performed various edits such as marking different roads and buildings.
Ultimately, we created a map with only roads and buildings along with a legend. That was ready to be published. We were also shown the different APIs available for use and encouraged to use them for our Capstone Projects.
After this, we inserted this data to Here Technologies using the ‘Here Map Creator’ tool. This concluded our training.
Next, we were divided into teams of 3. My teammates were Srirag and Raghuvamsi. Our job was to identify and mark roads, buildings, and places. However, due to Coronavirus and the lockdown, we were not allowed to leave our houses and thus the target was revised to mark 3000 km roads. In order to improve our communication skills and get a taste of the corporate world, one person from the group would be the moderator while the other two would mark roads. The job of the moderator was to check whether the roads were correctly marked or not. The role of the moderator was swapped every week.
Our mentor, Ms. Mudrika would periodically share with us how many roads were getting accepted and give us feedback.
This was the UI of the Map Creator Platform:
On the left side, clicking the pie icon would bring up our statistics:
This was very helpful in keeping track of our progress. There was also a ‘your feed’ button which showed the progress of each road marked.
Roads were marked using the button on the right. The UI was very simple to use.
There were also multiple map viewing options. We used this to distinguish between roads and canals since it was easy to get confused between them. Satellite and Alternate Satellite view were the most commonly used modes.
Using these tools, marking the roads was very simple. Our team managed to mark approximately 3100 km.
In conclusion, I would like to say that this was a nice first opportunity and was very informative. My mapping skills have definitely improved. This, in particular, was very useful to me since I recently started learning about drones and found out that before you can take off you need to provide a flight plan and send it to the authorities. This was easy since I was already taught QGIS. I’m also happy to have helped in the Digital India Movement by connecting people from villages and other remote places to one another.
