What do you do when you can't find a ready made spatial data file or shapefile or feature class for what you are trying to do? You build it of course. This weeks lab was two fold. First, building tabular data using some known points originally in Latitude and Longitude, which needed conversion to decimal degrees for display and usage in ArcGIS. That was an exercise in taking some data points and building an excel file which would be the data for a new feature class. Second, taking other publicly available address data and geocoding it into ArcGIS. This involved formatting the known addresses, again into excel, and transitioning that tabular data into another feature class within ArcGIS Pro.
In both cases, ready-made feature classes were not a thing, and the exercise was in translating available information into that usable within ArcGIS. Both parts of the lab were also in different areas. The first of the below being known eagle nests in the vicinity of the University of West, Florida. The second being schools across Manatee County, FL. Thank you to the Florida Department of Education for the addresses for the known schools.
Here is a look at the tabular data and resultant display for the eagles nests:
The following is a look at the schools mapped across Manatee County. This result is also available publicly, hosted by ArcGIS Online at the following link:
The challenge with this lab was the attention to detail with working in excel, and ensuring the formulas for data organization were appropriately entered. Making sure all of the headers were setup appropriately for the transition into ArcGIS online to be successful. Also I encountered some initial difficulties with running the address locator. This is a multi step process involving a specific tool which took the tabular data I created, and then matched it against the known map region to build point features based on address. Also, when data could not be matched, I relied upon finding the actual school within Google Maps, and then manually updating the point information for the geocoded results.
Ultimately this is an incredibly useful process, and the exercise in manually geocoding is invaluable. Thank you.
v/r
Brandon
No comments:
Post a Comment