Week 4 Lab 4

week 3 Lab 3 - Geocoding

 

In my geocoding map lab project I first decided to map bicycle shops in San Francisco.  I acquired 50 addresses and made an excel table organizing the Name, address and zip code into a table to use in arcmap.  I downloaded a streets layer shape file from the San Francisco government website and made an address locator from it.  I then geocoded the 50 bike shop addresses onto the San Francisco streets reference layer.  Most of my addresses matched quite easily, but those that hadn’t were then matched manually.  By geocoding the addresses I was able to display the distribution of bike shop throughout the San Francisco peninsula with great accuracy. 

After realizing how easy this can be once the steps become familiar, standard and repeatable I decided to complicate the analysis further by adding geocoded Brewery locations.  I wanted to find breweries that were close to bike shops and vice versa, bike shops that were close to breweries.  Bike shops and breweries are places that I frequent often and I wanted to know where it would be most convenient to visit in order to efficiently experience both. 

I made another table with brewery locations and then geocoded those addresses as well, on the same reference layer.  I then made 1000ft buffers around both breweries and bike shops and did a “search by location” function to result in bike shops within 1000ft of breweries and a separate function to find breweries within 1000ft of bike shops.  I made separate symbols for the locations that were close to each other and then labeled them so you could find them on the address table.   

Overall the function of geocoding is extremely useful and can be very quick and easy if your addresses are in a format that imports into Arc easily (excel).  This feature makes it very useful for performing analyses on any type of location data such as proximity, or containment, or just displaying the locations of various places of which you have addresses for. 

Week 2

Week 1 Lab 1