Week 12 incorporated geocoding, network analysis and ModelBuilder. Geocoding was used to associate street addresses of emergency management service sites with geographic locations. The process involved importing a feature class and table into the provided geodatabase and then setting up an address locator. The address locator was used to automatically match the addresses to geographic locations. Any resulting unmatched addresses were manually matched utilizing likely candidates returned by the address locator, reference maps such as GoogleMaps with street view and other sources including the Lake County EMS website. The latter was used to verify the correct EMS station addresses in the data. Some sites were especially difficult to match even after consulting several resources, so the "real" answers and how they were determined would be welcome information. Field inspection of such sites would probably be a good idea as well. After the address matching, the attribute table was edited to include missing city names.
 Lake County, Florida |
Building on the information obtained from the geocoding process, a network analysis was performed to determine the optimal route between three points. A map incorporating two data frames containing the above information was created.
The final part of the lab was an exercise to introduce the ModelBuilder for the purpose of creating and managing models. The use of models enables analysts to put together strings of geoprocessing tools such as selecting, buffering, intersecting, and dissolving, to apply to data in one workflow resulting in one final output. Obviously the success of the model is dependent on the successful completion of each tool in order.
Although this was a lot of information to assimilate in one lab exercise, the practical application and value of each section is readily apparent.
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