Eddie's GIS Blog

This week was all about Georeferencing and using ArcScene. Georeferencing was really cool because you were basically drawing on the map. You trace the outline of a building or just trace a road and then: boom! you have made a new part of the map. I also learned how to edit an attribute table in ArcMap. These were some of my burning questions from the start. like if I was working as a database manager for a city and a new building was built, how exactly would I add it on? Now I know at least one way, and I am sure that there are more ways that I will learn about during some other classes. ArcScene was interesting but I found it hard for it to be informative on it's own. I could see using it in the future to make some sort of graphic aide for a presentation. Here are some of the maps I made this week:

This week was all about geocoding and making models in ArcGIS. Patience was also a big part of this week's work. All in all the process was not too hard, just parts of the geocoding was tedious. All of those parts revolved around the address locator not locating an address. Having to look up the locations on another map and try your best to find that same spot on your own map took quite awhile for some of the locations. On the other hand, making a model took out a ton of the tedious parts of making a map. All the steps that I would normally do were right there in one window and after setting it all up it just took one click and everything was taken care of. I do like working out all of the steps to see my progress, but it was nice not to have to keep up with all of the intermediate data, as the model like to call it, that I usually make. In the long run the model made things more simple, however I still really like fiddling around with the map data and seeing the changes I am mak

This week was really cool! I got to use some programming language to run tools in ArcGIS and the process was pretty simple. It was very much like coding something on Codeacademy. Playing with the buffer tool was fun because now I can make areas around a point and have them represent something. Before If I had points I had to make the symbol huge to have the color show. This makes comparing certain attributes easier to visualize on a map. The overlays are really cool and simple to use too. Both of those tools are simple to use, and their names make it easy to decide which one you should use. I also can see how using this tools can be tedious if you have to run them, but you are not quite sure of what you want (like 100m buffer or a 150m buffer). Here's a nice map that I made for a mystery area that highlights some prime campsites.