Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Department of Urban Studies and Planning
11.520: A Workshop on Geographic Information Systems
11.188: Urban Planning and Social Science Laboratory

Test Feedback, Project Work, & Presentation Tips

 

November 18, 2009, Joseph Ferreira

Administrative

  • Two Items due on Stellar today: Lab #8 and Project Proposal
  • No new lab exercises or homework - focus on individual project work

Today

  • Initial feedback & discussion of test
  • Project presentation tips (using Cherrie Abbanat's slides)

Test Feedback

  • Answers are now online as a link in the test folder
  • Comments on common difficulties
    • Copying test09data to a local drive
      • On lab machines, the desktop and your I:\ drive are not local
      • Using C:\usertemp or C:\temp is faster
      • MS-Access not needed for test since table manipulation was easy in ArcMAP
    • Tagging the Exits with the name of the Town they are in
      • Point-in-polygon operation
      • Spatial join
    • Thematic map
      • Use proportional symbols (better than graduated symbols in this case)
      • Main pattern: Parking lots are near major roads
      • Extra observations:
        • lots are not in inner core area
        • A few lots are not oriented to cars but to ferry, train, or plane
    • 'Near' tool
      • All you needed was the new 'Near distance' attribute
      • the 'Near FID' attribute is the feature ID of the exit that is closest
    • Raster manipulation
      • Spatial Analyst 'options' and Toolbox 'environment' are different
        • Be careful about extents, mask, and cell size settings
      • Use 'zonal statistics' in spatial analyst or 'Zonal statistics as table' in ArcToolbox
        • Some machines did not run tool properly
        • Avoid loosing points if you document where it went wrong
      • Tricky to work with raster values
        • 'attribute table' is not visible for floating point values
        • 'attribute table' is grouped by value for integer values
    • File organization and performance issues for project work
      • C:\usertemp (or C:\temp) are local, desktop and I:\ are not
      • Set locations in the environment: workspace and scratch space
      • Redundancy can be good!
        • Read-only copy of originals (test08data)
        • Local working copies
          • proj09_working folder
          • Many MXDs: 11.520_proj09_working1.mxd, 2, 3, ...
          • Use Access: 11.520_proj09_working.mdb
          • Use Data Frames with different joins, coordinates, etc.

Project Presentation Tips

  • Cherrie Abbanat's powerpoint slides
  • Monday's Lab (Nov. 23)
    • Work individually on project
    • Discuss project focus and data issues with us
    • Separate 20 minute meeting with undergrads
      • Group discussion about project and CI requirement
      • Meet in back of 37-312 lab at 2:15

Last modified 18 November 2009 [jf]
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