Background and Goals
The objective of this assignment was to display the ability of downloading online data and creating maps from the corresponding standalone tables. This assignment is also designed to give experience in obtaining data from the United States Census Bureau's website and applying that data in both static and dynamic maps.
Methods
To begin this lab, I went to the United States Census Bureau’s website to download data about Wisconsin's counties for year 2010. Once on the American Fact Finder page, I navigated to the Advanced Search menu. From there I searched 2010, total populations, Wisconsin Counties, and the Wisconsin shapefile repectedly. Once searched and selected, I downloaded the 2010 SF1 100% population data. I then repeated the previous steps but instead of searching for population, I searched for vacant housing under the occupancy tab in the topics section.
Once the data was downloaded, I edited the data in Microsoft Excel. To do so I formatted the populations and vacancy columns to numbers so that it could be brought into ArcMap. In the case if vacant house I created a separate column in which I divided the total number of houses by the number of vacant houses to find the percentage of vacant houses per county. The reason I used the percentage of vacant houses instead of the total number of vacant houses was because I wanted to show the percentage of vacant houses. If I were to use the total number of vacant houses the data would have been skewed by counties with larger populations.
Once the Excel spreadsheets were formatted correctly I converted the spreadsheets to excel worksheet files (xlsx) where they could then be brought into ArcMap. In ArcMap I brought in the Wisconsin shapefile and the newly formatted spreadsheets as standalone tables. I then joined the standalone tables to the shape file by their common attributes in a one to one relationship. Once the tables were joined, I created a new geodatabase to store the new feature classes I was going to create using the Wisconsin shape and its joined tables. I created a new feature class for both the 2010 populations and vacant housing files. I then opened a new map document and imported the new feature classes from the newly created geodatabase. I then classified the new feature classes by quantities in the symbology tab in feature properties and selected an appropriate monochromatic color scheme for each. Once I edited the ranges of the classifications I created maps for the two feature classes in the layout view.
Once I had my static maps completed my next task was to take my vacant housing feature class and create dynamic map on ArcGIS online. I signed into ArcGIS by using my UWEC enterprise account in ArcMap. Once signed in I used the Share As menu where I published my map as a service connected to the (UW-Eau Claire – Geography and Anthropology) hosted service.
Once the map information was uploaded to ArcGIS online, I opened a new web browser and signed into my enterprise account in ArcGIS online and went to the My Content tab. Once in My Content I added my feature layer that I imported from ArcMap into an online dynamic map.
Results
The first two maps below were created using the layout view in ArcMap using the data collected from the U.S. Census Bureau. The third map was created via ArcGIS online using the imported feature class from ArcMap.
Sources
Data Access and Dissemination Systems (DADS). (2010, October 05). American FactFinder
Search. Retrieved March 08, 2017from https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/searchresults.xhtml?refresh=
