*For some reason my graph would not export in color, even though it displays in color on ArcMap
Potentials and Pitfalls of GIS
Starting out using ArcGIS, I was surprised at how familiar the program felt. While it is a completely new and different program than I was accustomed to using, I found it to be laid out in a familiar manner to many other applications and/or programs found on Windows. Many of the first few features I tried out had visual components making it that much easier to use. Thinking about it, ArcGIS is setup in a manner similar to Paint which is found on all Windows machines. This kept things intuitive when I just started out with the program. The familiarity made it that much easier when the program branched off into its specialized features to follow what to do.
This software program has great potential to visualize different data collected and convey information. It has an amazing amount of versatility in the kind of information you can present about one location. A user is able to take a map of a local area (i.e. near the airport) and locate the schools, plot out a noise contour of the area, show what land parcels are residential, or plot the population density of the area. This is just a small taste of the capability of this software. This software gives more precision to map making to clearly define borders and landmarks. The best feature of this software is that you can take a base map of an area and create many different maps of the area corresponding data without having to reenter the information of that map.
Conversely, the software has some issues that can make it difficult to use. Data migration and storage is somewhat complicated; you have to use a different element of the program to load your data storage. Another issue is that running statistics on a given geographic layer map or combining geographic layer elements into a new layer map can be quite involved and challenging. I found manipulating the existing maps to be fairly simple, but manipulating the data of the layers required some work and understanding of the product and how it can combine and merge data. Another issue came about when transforming data from a table to a graph and then adding into a map. While some of it was intuitive if you have used a Spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, it is not as straight forward a process when moving from a stand-alone graph to layering it into the map. The most glaring issue I found was learning how the data sets are stored and to be used when compiled together for creating a new map or data frame. Not comprehending how I could use each data set was frustrating because I felt I was learning through trial and error. However, I would recommend this software for analyzing geographic data and creating visuals.
Overall, I was impressed with the ease of use of the ArcGIS software. The learning curve of the program slowed me down, but once I got over that, I found it to be a very effective program. For someone new learning to use the program, as long as he/she have seen a Spreadsheet program and worked with a Paint-like program, he/she can figure out how to work this software. When completing the tutorial I starting thinking of the additional plots and maps I could make analyzing this airport expansion issue. As a person uses this program, he/she will be able to better understand the patterns in the collected data and begin to make hypotheses about a given geographic region. The best part of GIS is that once you make a hypothesis and collect the data, you can quickly determine the validity of your theory and find what information needs to be collected next to get a better understanding of the situation.
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