Network Analyst - Prepare Week

Special Topics - Project 1 Week 1

Our first project was to act as a city employee preparing for a major hurricane projected to make landfall the next week.  The project was divided into three stages to complete over three weeks; Prepare, Analyze, and Report.  

With a major hurricane projected to hit Tampa, Florida the city has to make preparations for the storm.  Those preparation included determining road closures in low-lying areas likely to be impacted by the storm, evacuation routes and plans, distribution plans for FEMA aid to storm shelters, and basic information to the public.

This week, for the Prepare stage, a basemap was created to use in the following weeks.  We started with several feature classes of data required to complete the analysis in the next stage.  These included streets, fire and police departments, hospital, shelters and a National Guard Armory locations, a DEM and a boundary of the study area.  

The first task was to clip all the feature classes to the boundary of the study area and reproject them to the specified projection.  Python tools were provided to perform these tasks in batches, but an update to ArcMap seems to have made them a bit glitchy so it took a lot more time and effort to use the tools than to do each feature class one by one.  Still, it was a good refresher on how to edit tools.

Once the clipping and projecting was done the DEM was reclassified into a discrete data set with several categories of elevations, then converted from a raster to a polygon for those areas less than 6 feet.  A couple fields were added to the streets layer in order to determine which streets were likely to flood and create the best routes throughout the city and around the flooded areas.

Another tricky step was editing and exporting the metadata.  Some of the datasets had complete metadata, some had some or none.  For those that needed data added, the export process worked just fine.  The datasets that didn't require data added transferred to the new folder, but the metadata didn't transfer with it.  In order to get the files to transfer with their metadata I had to make and save something in each of the files.  

The map was saved to a Map Package and zipped with the Metadata folder.

A Residential GIS Location Study

Applications in GIS Final Project

Well it's easy to see why this project usually gets three weeks during a normal semester. The project was to produce a residential location study using GIS to help a woman and her daughter get started on house hunting in St. Augustine, Fl.  The analysis involved two proximity analyses, three calculated analyses, and two weighted analyses, one equal, one favored.  With the completion of the analysis recommendations were made on three tracts that best fit the criteria they had set.

To present the data a Power Point presentation was made.  It is located at this site:

http://students.uwf.edu/mr80/AppsFinalProject_MR.pptx

Sharing Tools

GIS Programming - Mod 11

Our final assignment for this course was Sharing Tools.  We started with a script that was already written and a tool that was already made.  The script had a couple paths that were hard coded to non-existent files or locations so our first step was changing those paths to parameters defined by the tool.  To do that we used the sys.argv[] function, which is very similar to GetParameterAsText() as it always returns string objects.

 With the variables set to pull the paths from the tool parameters the tool then ran correctly and added random points and put buffers around them, so we moved on to clean up the tool a little bit.

The dialog box has a help window that explains the purpose of the tool and the requirements for all the parameters, but it doesn't just magically appear with the creation of a tool, so we entered it by editing the Item Description in ArcCatalog.  Since this tool was a combination of two existing tools, Create Random Points and Buffer, the explanations could pretty much be copied from those tools with just a little tweaking.

Once the script and the tool were both cleaned up and grade A professional looking the script was imported to the tool so the tool could more easily be shared, requiring only the passing of the toolbox.  And to make sure nobody could sneak in and sabotage all my hard work on this my last GIS Programming assignment, I password protected it with a diabolically clever password nobody would ever figure out in a million gazillion years.

While I really enjoyed the entire course, I think what I enjoyed most was learning how to create custom tools.  It frustrates me to use a program and always wonder how it knows what to require of me and what to do with the information I give it.  Creating custom tools gave me a behind the scenes, behind the screen, view of what is going on.  Now I have a sense of what goes into the making of dialog boxes and what the limitations and possibilities can be.  I think that is something that can come in very handy in the future, especially for making GIS more usable to others who don’t have time to learn the program.  They only have to learn how to enter the data required, and they’re making their own maps.

Another thing I really enjoyed was debugging.  I just don’t feel I have a deep enough knowledge yet to really be very successful at it.  Hopefully once I get back to work I’ll have the opportunity to use Python and get to really dig deep into it.