Data Collection

There are several sources of data that were required for this project. All geographic data was projected into the NAD 1983 UTM Zone 10N coordinate system which is appropriate for the GVRD area.

Existing Dim Sum Restaurants

A great deal of time was spent finding the locations of existing Dim Sum Restaurants in the GVRD.

First, specific criteria were chosen which a restaurant had to satisfy to be included in the list of Dim Sum restaurants. The main consideration was that the restaurant had to have specific times when their main business was dedicated to the serving of Dim Sum. Thus, regular Chinese restaurants that included only a few Dim Sum items on their menu did not qualify for inclusion in this project.

Candidate restaurants were found using a variety of sources. There were several website listings which contained some useful information, but all of them had missing restaurants, as well as restaurants that were no longer in business. Advertisements in Chinese newspapers were used to find some of the places. One particularly useful resource was the Vancouver Coastal Health Restaurant Inspection Website, which provided a list of names and addresses of almost all Vancouver restaurants. Many of the Chinese restaurants were called to confirm whether or not they could be considered to be a Dim Sum restaurant.

All of the restaurants were entered into Google Earth, which was able to find most of the street addresses. The collection of restaurants was exported as a kml file and later converted into an ArcMap projected shapefile. This file was imported into Idrisi for further analysis.

Census Data

All of the population data was collected during the 2001 Census. The boundaries of the Census Dissemination Areas for all of Canada were part of the DMTI Data Collection found in SFU's Spatial Information Systems Lab. The boundary polygons specific to the GVRD were selected and saved into a separate layer, which was then projected into the 1983 NAD UTM Zone 10N coordinate system.

The actual Census data for the GVRD was also available in the SIS Lab. One of the values used was the median family income. The remaining values used were the number of people that indicated a Chinese ethnic origin, the number of immigrants born in Hong Kong and the number of people that specified a knowledge of Cantonese. The three population counts were all divided by the area of the Dissemination Areas to yield a population density. Each of these quantities were used to create raster images with a resolution of 10 metres using ArcMap and imported into Idrisi.

GVRD Data

The SIS Lab contained copies of all of the GVRD data that was used in this project. This included land use data, street data and municipal boundaries. The land use data was converted into a raster image in ArcMap to be imported into Idrisi. Because this raster image was derived from a different shapefile than the census images, its extent had to be manually adjusted so that it had the same dimensions. The street data and municipal boundaries were only used in ArcMap to create some of the map images, and were not used in Idrisi.