One of the most grueling parts of any GIS project is the collection and preparation of data for analysis.  All the data that I needed for this project, in terms of topographical data, was located on the SIS drive on the SIS network.  The data is from the GVRD/GEN directory: I utilized the roads, skytrain and city border vector layers, and nearly all of the raster coverages.  I then searched on the web for some tabular income and population data on the Greater Vancouver Regional District and found it at the GVRD website, (obvious place to look).  Finally, I used the Telus pages to find locations of Wal-Mart stores, but only phone numbers were listed so I had to call each number and ask the people where their store was located.  I digitized these four store locations onto a Wal-Mart Vector layer.

        With my data in hand, I proceeded to make a series of palette files to use, rasterized the skytrain, roads and Wal-Mart data and made a choropleth map depicting average household income and a coverage with the population figures assigned to each municipality.  This would allow for the creation of a population density coverage later.  My plan is to make a series of boolean maps and run a multi-criterion evaluation.  In my presentation, I will show all the good maps produced, and include the boolean maps as links.

        The CITY raster image had all the islands in the GVRD listed as seperate entities, hence I needed to merge them with surrounding municipalities.  In addition, Anmore, Belcarra and Electoral district A needed to have their data combined on the Income map.  Being an average value, I needed to calculate a new average for the whole area by weighting each area by it's population.  I took the populations of all three areas, added that up, then divided each of the populations by that total to get a weighting percentage.  I applied this percentage to each of the three income values, added them up and got my new average income for the Anmore/Belcarra/Electoral District A conglomeration.

        Author's Note:  I originally was going to tackle this project on the basis of the Coquitlam Town Centre area and I did collect topographic data for the area from the City of Coquitlam's Operations Department.  Unfortunately, the zoning data was not in ANY digital format and the data required would have taken weeks to prepare.

        Thank you to Henry Wong, Geomatics Manger of the City of Coquitlam, for providing me with the data, despite my lack of use.