Week 5: Adding XY Data Points and Geocoding
Adding XY Data to ArcGIS Pro
For the first part of the lab, we created an Excel table of the latitude and longitude of three eagle's nests in Santa Rosa County, FL. The coordinates were given in degrees, minutes, and seconds, so we had to extract each of these numbers and use a formula to convert them to decimal degrees. We then opened this table in ArcGIS Pro and used our new latitude and longitude coordinates in decimal degrees to plot points for the three eagle's nests. Finally, we projected the data to the State Plane Florida North projection.
Geocoding
For this part of the lab, we took a list of schools in Manatee County, FL and their addresses from the Florida Department of Education website and geocoded them to a map in ArcGIS Pro. We had to rearrange the data from the website in Excel to create a table that could be imported to ArcGIS Pro. We then created an address locator to find the locations of the schools based on their addresses. Seven of my addresses were unable to be matched by the address locator, so I had to locate them on the map by hand. This was a difficult process because I had to make decisions about what location to choose based on inaccurate or conflicting data.
Several of the unmatched addresses were due to the address locator being unable to interpret minor variations in how the street name was written, which was easy to resolve. Two of the addresses given were PO boxes, which obviously don't correspond to physical school locations. For those, I located the address in the attribute table to find the school's name and looked up the school on Google Maps to find a physical address, then found that location in ArcGIS Pro using the Imagery Hybrid basemap. One of the PO box schools, Hospital Homebound Instruction, gave me an address in Tampa when I searched it on Google Maps, so I geocoded it to that location, even though it wasn't in Manatee County.
Another school, Lakewood Ranch Preparatory Academy, was listed with an address in Fort Lauderdale. Google Maps gave me a Manatee County address when I searched for the school, but when I looked at the aerial imagery in both Google Maps and the Imagery Hybrid basemap in ArcGIS Pro, it looked like an empty field. Maybe the school was built recently and the aerial imagery hasn't been updated in a few years? I debated whether it was better to have a correct physical location that didn't match the Fort Lauderdale address, or a physical location that was wrong but matched the address. I decided to geocode the school to the empty field in Manatee County, because this is supposed to be a map of schools' locations in Manatee County. It seems like the most satisfying way to resolve unmatched addresses like this would be to update the data table with the school's correct address so it matches the location I chose on the map. However, this wasn't discussed in the lab, so I didn't edit the table.
When I tried to share my completed map as a web map, I got an error saying that the basemap and the layers were in different projections. I didn't want to reproject the layers to WGS 1984, since we had intentionally projected them to the State Plane Florida West projection, and I couldn't change the projection of the basemaps or share it without a basemap. After some Googling and trial and error, I found a relatively simple solution. I converted my USCounties_HarnSP layer to a basemap and added that to my map, so everything was in the State Plane Florida West projection. I think a basemap with imagery and labels would look a lot better and be easier to understand, but the workarounds I found for creating an imagery basemap with a custom projection seemed like they would be difficult and time-consuming.
Here is the link to my web map:
https://pns.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=6c650a7a56e44e23a242af01b63e2cc8
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