Wednesday, February 13, 2013

GIS LAB week 4 and 5: introduction to ArcGIS





Pitfall and potentials of ArcGIS

            My experience of the ArcGIS map software system was a love hate relationship. The potential of this technology is astounding. The ability to quickly update and modify the maps was one of the greatest advantages of this technology.  The potential of the maps and what they were able to do with data as well as the ability to change from layer to layer easily was by far one of the most beneficial aspects of this technology.  I think that the potentials of this technology are endless.  I love the fact that you can use it for anything and that you can create hundreds of maps based off the idea of how noise will effect the populations around an airport.  Overall I was impressed on what the technology could do and was amazed on how it can create maps out of data like the one we were using. However, being a first time user, I felt it was very frustrating and difficult to figure out how to use the software. 
Overall from my brief experience with the technology I cannot find many other positive aspects of the software other than what we already discussed in class.  Personally I felt it was very difficult to like the software. However, I can see how it may be easier to use once you understand the software.  Overall I am actually excited to learn more about the software and actually learn how to create maps on my own without having step-by-step instructions. I am also excited to see the advantages that the software will have in my future career, working in conservation. 
            Overall I had a very difficult time with the software and still feel like I do not understand much of it. I do not think the software is very user friendly, and I think someone who has no experience or very little will not have a clue on how to use the technology without a detailed description on how to do it every time. Also the software is not self-explanatory.  I felt like there were many useless steps and that some items were placed in such a way that made it very difficult to locate.  For example, the tutorial kept saying to use the draw tool bar, but there was not such thing.  Every time I logged onto the software I would have to customize my tool bar and add the drawing tool to it, which was very inconvenient since this was a feature that was used frequently when making maps.  I understand that the tutorial was giving us a broad overview therefore we were doing basically a small sample of everything we did.  However, I thought a lot of the steps were worthless, and very repetitive especially when it would make you change something that you did before, making the whole project very frustrating.
            The downside of the technology was the overall look of the system. For the leading software in GIS I wasn’t very impressed about the layout of it. It looked very outdated and I felt as though it could have been made to look more professional and overall easier to navigate. It seemed to resemble an older version of Microsoft.  Another drawback of the software is that it is too sensitive.  For instance, if you do one tiny thing wrong it could potentially destroy your map causing you have to spend numerous hours deleting fixing and redoing another map. This happened to me with the steps about the calculations, when I entered the data what I thought was correctly, my map was distorted and was not correct. So this was very frustrating to me and proved that the technology is too sensitive. 

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