My Project was actually one big problem.
First of all I wanted to do a project on forestry and First Nations land claims, alternative uses, conflicts and so
forth. But I could not get any data, mainly because the First Nations Associations were not willing to give out
data because of the explosive nature of the issue to First Nations.
Then I had the idea for my actual project which turned out to be problematic enough.
I covered the problems throughout the whole Webpage so I just give a general overview, an Error Analysis, and
a Result.My first problem was how to read the data tables provided by the SIS-server. Within this tables, table 10ea had
no fitting key to read it. So I used the key of table 10 (Census Tracts) as suggested by Jasper.
The next thing was to clean up the tables. DATABASE WORKSHOP does not provide very good manipulating
tools, so I had to delete everything manually in EDITOR which took me a while. And to do that I had to inspect my
images very thoroughly to find out, which Enumerations Areas I had to keep.
After I solved that everything seemed to workout.
But when I finally wanted to calculate the least cost pathway it was not possible. I figured out, that my friction surfaces
had zero values, which I thought was the source of my trouble.
So I went all the way back to reclass everything again, assign new friction values, create frictionsurfaces, costsurfaces
calculate a pathway. But it was not possible again.
I tried now to split my skytrain line up into smaller parts, to get rid off the distraction of the costsurface caused by the
river (friction value of one which indicates an average cost to pass through). But even that failed.
So I had to think of alternatives to get a result.
I created a costsurface for the major roads. So the PATHWAY module had to follow the streets.
But again it was not possible.
So in the end I digitized the three main corridors, created a cost surface for them and the one with lowest maximum
cost was the most suitable corridor to build a new skytrain line.
Error Analysis:
After all that trouble, I'm pretty sure that my costsurface has errors in it. When I explored the corridor costsurfaces, the
highest value was not at the destination, there were higher values elsewhere.
So it definitely has to do with my weghting of the criteria and the WLC matrix.
But I was not able to find the right weighting.
So in the end all my trouble tracks back to a lack of "real" evaluation criteria and I obviously choose the wrong weighting
of each factor in relation to another one.
Result:
I'm glad that I finally found out anything, even if it is just a re-evaluation of existing plans.
So I failed in finding a complete new perhaps better result than those three corridors.
The Cambie Corridor was the winner with the lowest suitability cost regarding the evaluation criteria I took into account.