Test could be an (abbreviated) example of a possible project
This year: examining municipality budgets in greater Boston area
Comparing equalized assessed value per capita and various town revenues and expenditures
Examining spatial pattern within metro areas with particular attention to location of infrastructure; population demographics, community type, etc.
Last year: examining consequences of newly released FEMA flood zones for Mass
Possible project focus: What residences and commercial buildings are in 500 year flood zone
Compare with structures in 100 year flood zone; research recent changes; estimate increased insurance cost due to changes; estimate extent of recent Congressional 'rollback'
Spring 2013:
Possible project focus: look separately at land and building values and residential/commercial/academic uses; aggregate and interpret at block and neighborhood lever.
Spring 2012: spatial and socio-economic factors correlated with vehicle miles travelled (VMT
)
Possible project focus: examining other measures (such as distance to CBD, density, train station, etc.); comparing two or more communities
Project would require a little more digging and spatial analysis
Project could provide context and first step in a longer study
Comments on test
- Common issues and suggestions:
Several ways of doing many parts:
Select by location vs. spatial join
ArcGIS query vs. MS-Access
One-to-many relationships
Financial data are for whole municipalities
Map has 600+ polygons but only 351 municipalities in Massachusetts
need to be careful when counting towns (not polygons)
Map design
and readability
Foreground/background emphasis
Use of transparency and color ramps
Quantile vs. natural break vs. equal interval vs. standard deviation
Match interpretation to choice of method and specify method
See posted solutions for more discussion
File organization and performance issues for project work
C:\temp is local, desktop and I:\ are not
Set LOCAL locations in the environment for workspace and (especially) scratch space
Redundancy can be good!
Read-only copy of originals (e.g., test14data)
Local working copies
proj15_working folder that you move from network to C:\temp and back
Many MXDs: 11.188_proj15_working1.mxd, 2, 3, ...
Use Access (personal geodatabase): 11.188_proj15_working.mdb to store datasets
Use multiple windows (especially on big screens)
Use Data Frames with different joins, coordinates, etc.
Open multiple ArcMap sessions along with Access and Excel
Just keep the file versions straight
And you may need to close files if locked for another use
Refresh issues in ArcMap
Sometimes, removing a table and adding an edited version of it will add the old version
Save ArcMap document, exit ArcMap, and restart - then add table
This happens if you edit the table outside ArcMap and do not change the name