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.
No comments:
Post a Comment