Lab 4
10-2/3-07 The step by step process of the ArcGIS program was pretty easy to follow. I added another layer to the world map that we first put down…it was a point on the map that showed the biggest cities of the world. The attribute property is pretty easy to use. So this makes selecting countries pretty easy. Finding the symbology tab was pretty difficult. I realized soon after I was looking for it that instead of clicking on the world layer, I needed to click on the sublayer that I wanted to edit. Making a selection such as selecting a highway from one of the layers was pretty self explanatory.
The two different maps that I decided to make were one map of Ohio and vacant residents for this I made the scale shade light to dark red. The other was number of households for this I made the scale light to dark blue. there is a larger number of households around bigger cities where highways come together. The number of vacant houses are larger when you move to southeast Ohio where there is the fewest amount of highways.
Two interesting things that I found out how to do were compare different points on one map using different colored points. And another thing that I found out how to do was put different graphs on the map to compare different values of different parts of the map.
I created a map of Colorado (the state that I am doing my main project on) and looked at some of the similar things as the Ohio map such as population and its correspondence to highways. The highways all lead to main cities such as Boulder and this happens to be where the population is the highest. I also added rivers to the map and most of them are in central to western Colorado.
I then made another map of the United States and put points to where all the golf courses in the United States were located. I was not a huge fan to see how large Alaska was compared to the rest of the united states because it made it difficult to look at what I was mapping because there aren’t even any golf courses pointed in Alaska. I also added and area code layer to the map as well, for no real reason in particular other than curiosity.
Map Document (mxd file)- The file in ArcMap that contaions one map, its layout, and its associated layers, table, charts, and reports. Map documents can be printed or embedded in other documents.
Table of Contents- A tabbed list of data frames and layers (or tables) on a map that shows how the data is symbolized, the source of the data, and whether or not each layer is selectable.
Data Frame- A map element that describes a geographic extent, a page extent, a coordinate system, and other display properties for one or more layers in ArcMap.
Map Layer- The visual representation of a geographic dataset in any digital map environment. Conceptually, a layer is a slice or stratum of the geographic reality in a particular area, and is more or less equivalent to a legend item on a paper map.
Attribute Table- A database or tabular file containing information about a set of geographic features, usually arranged so that each row represents a feature and each column represents one feature attribute.
I think that the whole idea of ArcGIS is pretty cool. Its interesting to be able to chart data onto maps and make your own personal maps. Pretty much whatever you have the data for can go into making a map and changing up the detalis and values can make your map more interesting.
