In Part 1 we covered the basics of getting the census data and doing a simple join. Now in Part 2, we will work on making this data both more usable and accessible using the database design tools in ArcGIS Pro and also Publishing this data to ArcGIS Online for use in your own web applications. SETTING ALIASES One of the easiest ways to improve the usability and readability of census data is to set the aliases and numeric formats before working with the data. Doing it before we work, will save us time in editing the legends and final products. We can go into the fields and edit these using in e ..read more

Census data is a great resource for any GIS project, but it can be very overwhelming, and using it can be tricky at times. The data are in many forms on the Census.gov website but I have found that using the TIGER/Line with Selected Demographic and Economic Data is by far the easiest method of getting a lot out of it. This data comes in a prepackaged Geodatabase with the spatial data, a metadata table, and then many other tables with numerous attributes. Using this geodatabase is easy, but finding your story can be a little hard. Part 1 of this 2-part post is just joining and getting a simple ..read more

With school starting back up, I wanted to share a workflow that can help administrators look at the chronic attendance issues. One thing that I have seen is when talking with different school administrators, at the individual school level, they do not know of GIS and that Esri provides many tools to them for free. Many school districts have everything set up and a lot of time it gets lost in a central office with one or two people. Esri has made GIS accessible through ArcGIS Online and does not require a lot of data or training. With this workflow, you can create a map and highlight certain pa ..read more

It is that time of year when students are emailing in a panic saying that they found some GIS data but it is an E00 file and how do they get that into ArcGIS Pro. Based on ESRI’s page on the Tools that are not available in ArcGIS Pro, there is no E00 import option unless you have the data interoperability extension. The E00 import tools used to be in ArcMap/ArcCatalog, but with the sunsetting of that software in the near future, I was looking for an alternative for the students. This post goes through 2 methods, one using gdal command line and the other using QGIS. The E00 that I will be using ..read more

I teach a lot of cartography courses, and one thing we talk about in them is how to make maps more accessible. For the most part, we are talking about making them colorblind-friendly (for example ColorBrewer). I felt that this is a gap that is in many cartography classes, so I thought about what new technology is out there and what we can do. When 3D printers first came out, I saw a few street network maps that had limited information but were made for people with visual impairments. I thought that was really cool, and something that I would like to try. Those maps were basically 2D prints wit ..read more

I just saw that the NYS Redistricting Maps were rejected (https://www.whec.com/national/judge-rejects-new-yorks-redistricting-plan-orders-new-maps/6434302/?cat=10036). When I worked in local government I helped the board of elections in the redistricting process by providing training and getting the Census data into a GIS Project for them. With a lot of grassroots organizations out there trying to work with the process, I just want to help by providing a brief walk-through of an ArcMap tool for districting. This tool is one of the two tools that have not made it into ArcGIS Pro and is the reas ..read more

Designing a geodatabase can be quite time consuming if you are going through the individual tools in ArcGIS Desktop or ArcGIS Pro, but there is a pretty cool tool called X-Ray for ArcCatalog which makes it easy. X-Ray is a add on provided by the esri local government group (https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=9ea218ff575f4a5195e01a2cae03a0ae) and works with desktop versions up to the current. When it is installed it acts like an extension and is seen in another side panel with some easy to use tools. I will show some of the different tools and how you can utilize them for your own design ..read more

I have been getting started capturing UAV imagery with my Phantom 3 Pro and I wanted to get a processing software.  Right now I do have the resources to get one of the commercial products such as Pix4D, Drone2Map, or Drone Deploy, so I went the opensource route.  Web Open Drone Map (WebODM) is a great tool, and currently I am still learning its capabilities.  I have not tried my own captured data, yet (the Rochester, NY weather has not been cooperating to get a good flight) so I looked online for some sample data.  I found that ESRI had some data for Drone2Map lessons so I ..read more

Link to my GIS/SIG 2018 Conference Presentation ..read more