Geography 7 Lab 4

This experience of learning ArcGis was interesting. The tutorial took a long time, but that time spent on leaning a little bit about this software was worth it. Since I was very young, I learned geography back when I was in France simply because it was one of the major requirements there. Since I am a very scientific person (I am an electrical engineering major), and I learned geography since I was young, I know very well what everything we are learning is all about and the importance of understanding maps.

However, this class about geographical information systems is more than just learning maps. I knew when I was a kid that we could make maps. I could make them by hand or use special machines from satellites to camera to take pictures of the entire earth or part of a city. Ten to fifteen years ago, after Internet became popular and starting to become widely usable, I realized that many of those pictures taken could be found on the Internet with much more accuracy than with a camera. Being able to export pictures with great accuracy is great but the invention of one with the same accuracy was a tough challenge faced by engineers, especially computer scientists. After years of work, computer scientists were finally able to create softwares that enable us to create any type of map we desire with perfect accuracy to the human eye. One of the softwares was ArcGIS, which is the software we use for this class.

Using ArcGIS, you can make any map about any topic. It is possible that I could use this software later in my electrical engineering studies if I have to make map of the world showing the areas where the largest amount of semiconductor chips are made for example. In our case, we used an example of the proposed airport expansions. In the first map, we made a map showing the school and noise contour because of the effects of the surrounding airport. Then in that map, we created a road connecting other roads that avoids the school area. In the second map, we made a more detailed analysis of the land use and noise contour where we had different colors representing the amount of noise in the specific area that we are working on. To show even more detail, we made a bar graph of the number of parcels at different areas. In the last graph, we considered a very important and obvious map to include: the population density map.

In this lab, we made different maps with different subjects but are all linked to each other if we look at the big picture. We see here that using software to make maps are very useful in research subjects for school but also in real life. It could be very useful for people working on history as well as the people working in engineering. This tutorial showed us the wide quantity of functions that the ArcGIS software has and we will see in the next few weeks how this sofware can be applied to any topic in real life concerning maps. This is why we have a project at the end of the quarter that will use the ArcGIS software.