The biggest challenge for me is to get the data. Origianlly, I was interested in Gingshen growth in B. C. Gingsen growth is one of the big industry in B. C. There is some special requirements for gingsen, such as the land can not be reused for gingsen. The reason is still unknown. It is difficult to get the data that I wanted. 

The second challenge is to get metadata and understand them. Time flys, I switched to the data on S: drive, get an topic for Great Vancouver Area. I get the census data, but don't understand what is enumerated tract and area, even there are vector file in IDRISI format, I have a difficult time to link the frame file with the access database file. Since I don't know ArcView, it would be too late to get fresh data in ArcView format and transform it into IDRISI. I tried to export database file in Access format into .dbf, then import into Excel, transform the same file between Excel and .txt just want to get rid of the appending 0's at the end of the number and change the Tab key between numbers into a single space. After all the effort, and find out that the vector frame file doesn't match the database file. Without proper documentation, the data is useless, for example, what is the meaning of each column in the database file; what is the legend of the map, the meaning of the value.

At the last minute, I switch to Africa data just because the dataset is relatively completer in IDRISI format. There are legends on most of the maps. I still encounter problems such as the dimension of two maps are not the same and CROSSTAB doesn't work. 

I feel any computing tool is still a tool. Knowledge on what you should do is more important than learning how to use a tool. With computing background, I spend a lot of time in this course to learn those geographic concepts. Since I did very well in my labs, I only regret that I could have done much better with my project. I still enjoy this course.

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