Lab#4: Digitizing in ArcGIS

Shayda Haghgoo
Professor Shin
Geography 168

Lab#3: Geocoding

Shayda Haghgoo

Professor Shin

Geography 168

For lab this week, I chose to geocode 50 In-N-Out locations all over Los Angeles County. Acquiring the data was not that difficult for In-N-Out’s website includes a link to all the locations of their restaurants. Initially I copied and pasted the data into an Excel worksheet and from there I sorted the data to acquire the Los Angeles locations. After I cleaned up the data a bit I converted it to a dbf file in ArcCatalog. This is where I started having problems. Once I went through the necessary steps of creating an address locator and acquiring the county map data from the ESRI website, all my locations came up unmatched. I attempted to manually pick the locations but when I would input streets like Sunset and Venice, hundreds of Sunsets and Venices popped up possessing various from and to address and zip codes. 3 hours later, and only having matched 5 places, my ArcMap application closed on itself and I, of course, forgot to save. At this point I got completely over the whole entire lab.

However, it dawned on me that there was another way to geocode the data I acquired by using XY coordinates. I opened up Google Earth and inputted all 50 locations. By doing so I obtained the XY coordinates of each location and I converted them to decimal degrees on Excel. After that, it was semi-smooth sailing and I had my map up in no time.

I realized while inputting the data, the addresses did not match up correctly. GoogleEarth’s response to my inputs showed different zip codes and street names, yet every location it went to, it showed an In-N-Out right next to what they assumed to be my intended addresses. These instances made me believe that In-N-Out’s location data is old and incorrect since GoogleEarth knew much better about the In-N-Out location than the restaurant chain itself. Ultimately, the geocoding is only useful if the data is clear and up to date and the table with which it locates addresses from possesses an XY coordinate. Otherwise it’s just a waste of time to do such an application on ArcGIS--Google Maps would be a much better alternative.

Lab #2 ArcGIS Refresher Part 2

Shayda Haghgoo
Professor Shin
Geography 168

Lab #1: ArcGIS Revisited

Shayda Haghgoo

Professor Shin

Geography 168