Friday, November 2, 2012

week 4 assignment - ArcGIS







To get a clearer view of the final proposal, please click here.

1. Potentials of ArcGIS
When I was creating my maps, I was constantly surprised and amazed by the powerful functions ArcGIS had. I could see clearly how layers overlap layers and the final presentation of all layers was incredibly neat, clear, and beautiful. The final results made sense and enabled us to analyze the situation powerfully.

ArcGIS is an extraordinary program for visualization. You can simply translate tons of data--tables, bar graphs, line charts, etc.—into all kinds of graphs that are easy for people to understand. As we all know, most people's brains work better to process graph information, and people usually react to graphs first (than to words and numbers), so in this information explosion age, it's the best way to assist people processing large amount of data information. It can also make the information processing interesting and fun, since there’re a lot of interesting maps created by ArcGIS. ArcGIS enables us to put many layers to one graph so that we can understand the relations between a bunch of factors by looking for coincidences of them. That’s very useful for a lot of fields such as criminology, population studies, transportation planning, and so on.

2. Pitfalls of ArcGIS
Apparently it’s not easy for beginners to use the program, even if we follow a tutorial. I was having a hard time understanding and setting up all the stuff and I have to say that the bugs of the programs constantly prevented me from finishing the steps successfully. The interface of the ArcGIS seems that it hasn’t been updated for years, and it’s not so user-friendly because I was struggling to find the exact locations of buttons and tool bars I needed.

Because of the complexity, ArcGIS prevent a lot of people from using it in their daily life. Actually there’re some simple functions that are quite useful for everyday life, and people will have fun in creating their own interesting maps, so I guess ArcGIS can learn from the Window Office software, which, although each of them contains plenty of functions and it’s very hard to master them, they have a friendly User Interface and that enables non-professionals to use them easily. In this sense, I think ArcGIS should learn for Neogeography, considering more for users and adding more user-centric functions such as sharing and commenting online.














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