Data Collection
The data used in this project was collected primarily from the S: Drive under the Data Warehouse folder. Some files such as the GVRD Landuse and GVRD_DEM were taken from a previous assigment. Other data such as the location of the other golf courses in and around Vancouver were retrieved from the internet. Below is a list of the data that was collected:
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Canada Census 2006 (collected from S: Drive, used to extract population and income data for Metro Vancouver also created Dissemination Area (DA) map of Metro Vancouver)
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GVRD Landuse 2001 (collected from Lab 7, used to create various raster layers based on the landuse, examples include residential.rst, industrial.rst, lakeswater.rst, golfland.rst and protectedland.rst)
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GVRD_DEM (collected from Lab 7, used in the MCE for elevation and to create golfslopes.rst)
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Rives & Creeks (rivercreek.shp collected from S: Drive containing rivers and creeks in Metro Vancouver)
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Shorelines (shorelines.shp collected from S: Drive containing shorelines in Metro Vancouver)
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BC Highways (BChwy.shp collected from S: Drive containing highways in Metro Vancouver)
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Golf Courses (addresses collected from http://www.bcadventure.com/adventure/golf/vancouver/index.html, used to create golfcourses.shp)
Data Conversion
Shapefile To IDRISI
Many of the files taken for analysis in this project were shapefiles. To convert them into IDRISI raster files the shapefiles were first imported into IDRISI and converted to vector files. After this conversion, the RASTERVECTOR function in IDRISI was used to convert the vector files into raster.
Projection
All files were projected into the UTM-10N projection. Some of the shapefiles were originally in GCS_North_American_1983 projection. To convert these files to the UTM-10N projection, I used the "Project" tool in ArcToolBox. When the files were imported into IDRISI the shapefiles had to be converted again into UTM-10N. To do this I used the CONVERT module.
2006 Census Data
The census data that was collected from Data Warehouse were in .zip files. To access the data I had to find the exact .zip file that had all the census data that I wanted to use. The census data was then extracted and presented in the program Beyond 20/20 Professional Browser. Using this program allowed me to select specifically the income and demographic data that was needed for this project. The selected census data was saved as a database file (.dbf) and then "Joined" to an existing Dissemination Area (DA) map of Metro Vancouver.
Geocoding
To create a map with all the public golf courses in Metro Vancouver, the location of these courses had to be geocoded. To do this I found the addresses of all the public golf courses from http://www.bcadventure.com/adventure/golf/vancouver/index.html. Although this website also had the addresses of private golf course in Metro Vancouver as well as golf courses not in the vicinity of Metro Vancouver, I used personal knowledge to locate all of the local public golf courses. After the addresses were collected, I used the website http://geocoder.ca/ to find the latitude and longitude coordinates of the golf courses. These coordinates were written in a Microsoft Excel file and subsequently were used to determine point location of the golf courses on a map of Metro Vancouver. The tool "Add XY Data was used in ArcMap to create this point file.