This lab assignment was a relatively easier exercise. We just had to sort out the population data for the states that we had selected. The main goal of the lab assignment was to create useful data from raw data from internet resources. We gather information from the WWW about the population data but we do not realize that the softwares used to generate map of the data might not be able to process some unrequired data. We had to create excel as well as .Dbase files of the population data as required by the lab assignment. I ended up with a full formatted population data for the states of Florida and Georgia in excel files where the years from 1900 were formatted column-wise. We had to keep the FIPS code as the ArcGIS would need that part to link the population data. Since the latest version of Excel did not allow us to save the files in .dbf format, we had to use Open Office to get the desired file format. We also had to format all data in the ‘General’ format with no commas as ArcGIS does not identify those characters. Finding the data sources wasn’t an issue at all as the link to to the data was provided in the previous assignment. While generating the files we could infer from the population data if a given county ceased to exist or appeared a little later than the others as it was relatively new. We could make obvious guesses looking at the data, e.g. Campbell county of Georgia did not have the population data starting from 2008 going to somewhere about 1940′s. This tells us that the county must have stopped existing after a certain period of time in history. Altogether this was not a very tedious exercise, people who are adept at excel and are comfortable with copying and editing data would not take too much time with this exercise.
Lab 3: Lab Blog:-
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