My first task in this project was to find as much data as possible to give me any idea on what I wanted to do. I did not find any of my data on the web because I found a lot of it did not match the things I wanted to do on my project. Also a lot of other students were using data from on-line and found the data very difficult to use. I thought I would use the data that is available to me. Most of the data that I acquired was done so by using the telephone book or www.411.ca. I used the addresses of nursing homes, elementary schools, day cares, and community centres to find the eastings and northings on Google Earth. After getting all the eastings and northings I made a data table in Excel with the eastings, northings, and the name. I then saved the data table as a .dbf file and opened it in ArcMap.

In ArcMap I projected the X,Y coordinates using NAD1983Zone10n. This then gave me my points on my base map of Burnaby. The difficulties that I faced with this because of the different projections and coordinate systems I used. I first used X, Y geocoding which was a problem because I didn't know which projection the geocoder was using and there was not data on the geocoder. I wasn't able to project the data onto the basemaps that I had already made. After a lot of help from everyone I finally figured out that I needed find a new way of doing it. I then had to go back and get new coordinates. This time eastings and northings from Google Earth. This time my data was projected much easier and everything went a little smother from there.

Elementary School Data Table

Nursing Home Data Table

Daycare Data Table

The other data I used was from Translink, Canada Census 2001, and GVRD Landuse data. The census data provided information on population density. Population density is found by taking population and divide it by the polygon area. I didn't face any problems with the projections with this data because they were all projected using the same NAD1983Zone10n UTM projection.

After saving all my data into ArcMap I had to start the process of bringing all the data into Idrisi which was a long process that took up a lot of time. In the end I got all my data to show in Idrisi.

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