My first experience using ArcGIS was simple enough, yet a bit tedious, but it allowed me to see the potential and the pitfalls that ArcGIS offers. Given that it helps portray all the maps in certain views, it allows me to see all sorts of geographic information laid out differently by sorting the different kinds of data. The two different views - layout and data - let me add and alter what data I'd like to see at certain moments, as well as help me alter what I need to alter per map of data. It makes it easy to switch off between the two. I can target certain purposes by displaying just the certain maps I want and the certain layers I want. The options of colors, labels, and outlines make it all the much easier for a user to read the maps.
Points, lines, arcs, and areas can be quite accurately drawn on GIS, adding another potential to GIS. This is especially useful when wanting to draw maps accurately of an area with an already laid out area or for making proposals. Like with this assignment, the use of creating the lines, adding points, etc, add benefits to the proposal of the airport expansion due the accuracy of where those points and lines are added. This also helps those who will look at the proposal visualize the proposal. Being able to display the population density on the layout will allow someone to see where within the county is busy and what to do with roads.
Along with potential comes the pitfalls of ArcGIS. The program itself is not very user-friendly. It is helpful to have a tutorial, but I had trouble still since the version of ArcGIS was too new for the tutorial, therefore some of the images and options given in the tutorial were hard to find when I was actually trying to use the program. Without the tutorial, I'd be completely lost. It didn't help either that some of the names of certain tabs and options given to me in the tutorial changed so when I used the program, I was not able to readily find them as I hoped. If someone were to be more familiar to such software, like AutoCAD, it'd be a lot easier for them to use it. I was lucky to know how the layers worked due to my experience with Adobe Photoshop, but not everyone, especially students taking Geography 7 as a G.E. course, would know many of the functions of the software.
ArcGIS also made it difficult to just start on the project since I had to continuously make sure all my data was within the same folder and even when that was done, I still had problems. My layers wouldn't display and I ended up repeatedly trying to open my main map file. This made it even harder to try to work on the assignment via Remote Access since the information I had on my computer wasn't coming onto the other computer I was using through remote access. It ended up making me have to make sure to use one of the lab computers that have the software to make it less problematic.
All in all, this software takes time to get the hang of, but once an assignment is done, there is overall success to be noted with the maps.
No comments:
Post a Comment