Rachel's Captivating Musings on GIS

Last part of the tutorial

rddecker — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 02:43:02 +0000

I think I keep forgetting to write down that I did the last part of the tutorial. It was a great time and I enjoyed learning about flow charts even though it seemed like a strange way to make a map.

Owner Occ vs Rent/Lease update

rddecker — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:17:14 +0000

To put all the owner occupied vs rent/lease onto one map, we made it a ratio. We made a new column in the attribute table called “RatioOwnRe” which stands for Ratio of Owners to Renters. So to do this we made data where we divided the column “housing_un” by “housing_1″ which gives the ratio of owner occupied vs the rent/leasers. There was one block that did not have data for this so we made each housing_un and housing_1 value for it to be 999999999. The ratio for this is then one so we excluded one when deciding how to break up the classification. The census block groups then that have a ratio of less than one mean that there are more renters in that block and it was made red. If the ratio was above one, which most were, they were made varying shades of green. This came from the Claritas data.

Property Parcels

rddecker — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:58:41 +0000

My part of the project was to map out the different property parcel’s worth, as seen here. The data all came from DALIS. housing-values

I also mapped out the year each house was built to see if it is before 1978 because that was the year lead was made illegal to be put in paint. If a house was built before this year it is marked because, even though I don’t know if the lead paint was removed, there is still possibility the lead is there still. lead-paint-possible1

My final map was owner occupied vs rent/lease homes. This information came from Claritas data. owner-occ-vs-rent-lease

Parcels Update

rddecker — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 01:07:53 +0000

Today I mapped houses that were built before 1978 so that I could see if they have a lead paint possbility. This is the year that lead was made illegal to be put in paint.

I used the Claritas info and data to do owner occupied vs rent/lease. The layer called owner occupied is housing_un and rent/lease is housing_1. This is on the census block level.

Parcel Information

rddecker — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:27:40 +0000

When mapping residential homes’ worth, I used the Delaware County Data that we already have. I opened the parcels layer and mapped only the residential parcels. I then selected the parcels and ordered them by worth. I removed the ones that had certain taxes of 0 to try to remove really expensive farm parcels that have been rezoned as residential but are just one house on a big piece of land. My list now only goes up to parcels that are worth 1.1 million instead of 3 million. I still need to figure out how to organize these breaks. I need to decide which home value would be considered high, middle and low class and I should organize by them. I need to find some statistics on either nationwide or Ohio wide standards of these high, middle and low class labels and should order them by that.

To find owner occupied vs rent/leased homes, I opened the same data as before and looked at only the residential layer. I looked at the attribute table and selected only features that were labeled as ‘N’ under CONDO on the table since I figured those were houses that were most likely owner occupied, but I can’t count that as complete at all. I need to figure out a way to find out what all the columns in the attribute table mean, such as hh_vac, because not even Googling it will give me an answer! So my goal is to figure out how to distinguish between these two.

Finally I must map the age of structures and their lead paint possiblity. I think I can easily map out the age of the structure using the select by attributes tool. I then need to find information that can tell me the most hazardous years for lead paint to be used. If a house was built around these years, I will select and map them too to make them known to have dangerous substance in them.

Property Parcel Info

rddecker — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 03:19:17 +0000

For the group project, Eric and I are working on the property parcel information, encompassing:

map: age of structure & lead paint possibility
map: residential housing values
map: owner occupied vs rent/lease

I quickly went over to the DALIS web project and looked on their site to see what I could dig up. I know some people who live in Delaware and I looked up their address on the site. I could immediately see where they lived, what year the house was built, whether they owned it, how much it was worth, along with many other tidbits of interesting info. I then went to the Census tab of the site and tried to get information about the census blocks and tracts to see if I could get some general info about the parcels of Delaware, but my computer wouldn’t let me for some reason. I think it would be very easy to get all the information I need from this website, I just need a little more instruction or time to play around on it with a different computer to figure it out.

I also need to know in which years companies stopped using lead in paint and see which houses were built before that date. There is always the possibility they repainted but I don’t think that fixes the problem of lead paint underneath. So as long as I know when lead paint was prominently used, it will be easy to get the information on when the houses/structures were built that would have these lead paints in them.

Seeing were the main rentals and leases are and the value of the property laid next to where environmental waste is being released will be an important map to see in an environmental justice project. Seeing the possible correlation to these two could open a lot of eyes to the things being done in Delaware, if there truly is something going on here.

Tutorial Ch 14-16

rddecker — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:34:12 +0000

I liked these chapters the best so far because they concentrated most on making your own features and editing them, which I thought was pretty cool. I feel like I am making my own map this way. They did not deal only with editing numbers or tables or other random things, but I actually got to draw some lines. Yep, these chapters were the best.

Delaware Data Map

rddecker — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 20:10:14 +0000

Annexation: Delaware’s annexations and borders from 1853 til now. It is only part of Delaware county and it is small.

Census Blocks is the blocks of Delaware county used for the census, adhering to political boundaries and showing roadways. It encompasses all of the county. Census tracts are made up of blocks and block groups.

Census block group is the overall breakdown of the blocks of the county.

Railroads show the few railways in the county.

Post office shows all the post offices.

Right of Way shows all of the roads that have the right of way in the county.

Roads shows all of the roads and is a very busy layer because there are so many lines to go with it.

Schools shows the many schools in the county. They all seem to be bunched in clumps together.

Census tract is the largest geography broken down by the US Census Bureau. It looks almost like census block group but has slightly different boundaries.

Master Address points shows the address points of everyone in Delaware County. There are dots all over!

Delaware Buildings Base 1 shows landmarks like fire dept, fairground, hospital, urgent care, etc.

I am not sure what Delaware Buildings 2 are…there are more than Buildings 1 though.

Delaware Cemeteries obviously shows all of the cemeteries around the township.

Delaware Farmlots are the farmlots of the US Military and the Virginia Military Survey Districts of Delaware County (there are a whole lot).

Delaware Golf Courses show all of the golf courses in the county.

Delaware Municipalities shows municipal boundaries in the county.

I think Delaware Parcels is the most intricate layer because it shows every single parcel division in the county, of which there are many.

Parks shows all of the area of parks in the county. I am not sure what park points are, but there are many throughout the county and they aren’t specifically in the areas of the parks.

Subdivisions show all subdivisions and condos in the county.

Floodplain came with four shape files and they show the floodplain within the county and the USGS grid it was marked onto.

I am not quite sure what historical archeological points are, but there seem to be a lot concentrated in different areas. Historical Delaware points are the same way but they seem to be concentrated mainly in the center of the county. National historical points must be also registered nationally as historical points of interest for the country.

The hydrology file has too many shapefiles to put on the map, and most are buffers of different rivers, but the main file shows the main areas of water in the county. Many are within parks which makes sense because a lake is nice to have in the middle of a park.

Master point shows all of the buildings in the county. The dots seem to follow the major roadways and clump in the cities, which makes sense.

Natural Heritage ODNR are polygons that mark places that are places of ecological interest as named by the Ohio Dept of Natural Resources.

The program continually wouldn’t let me open the orthophoto, but I imagine it is the real image of the county, taken by airplane.

Precincts shows the divisions of where people vote in the county. They are large blocks, each about the same size that cover the entire county.

Public Land Survey System are equal area blocks (less area than princints) that cover the entire county, but I am not quite sure what they describe. They are not equal blocks on the west side, so I do not know what that is about.

The school layer covers the whole county with blocks so it must be the different school districts.

The soils file shows all the different types of soils in the county, although it just looks like one big block with a bunch of points, it must need a legend to be deciphered.

I chose the file for Delaware township and it just covered the main square in the middle. Although it is a line file, it looks like a lot of points, but obviously the lines are extremely close together. I surmise that they show the different levels of height of the township.

The originial townships layer shows how the townships of the county used to be divided into 18 before the tax districts split them up.

The Traffic MORPSE layer contains information for the whole township. I opened the read me file to learn more and this is all it says “Traffic Zones:
This data contains a great deal of information, but we have no
way to identify what it is or what it means. We need a key
to understand what’s there. “

Watersheds shows all of the divisions of watersheds in the county. I surmise that each river has its own watershed but I think it is divided more than the number of rivers there are.

Wetlands gave small areas around the county that are probably very affected by the bodies of water and thus make wetlands.

Woodlands are areas around the county that are wooded!

Zip2004 are probably the different divisions of zip codes within the county. There are only a few, which makes sense.

I am not exactly what zoning implies what is being zoned, but it only seems to fit on a square of the whole thing which makes me think it does not fit the scale of the other layers.

Tutorial Ch. 10-13

rddecker — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:45:19 +0000

This time around we learned a rousing amount about selecting features by location, preparing data and making graphs, analyzing data and merging two sets of data, and projectin data. It was tons of fun!!

Tutorial ch 8-9

rddecker — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:22:54 +0000

These chapters were rousing. I liked learning how to make a table of houses to buy and it is kinda cool to see the photos of the homes before you go visit them yourself.

Chapter nine was a little less exciting because joining tables isn’t as cool as looking at pictures and making spreadsheets. Almost, but not quite.