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The COHGIS (City of Houston GIS) Open Data Portal website provides over 100 data sets including administrative boundaries, amenity locations, transportation routes, crime, and flooding. For this tutorial, we will download population and housing data from the 2010 census, which has been aggregated to super neighborhood boundaries.
- Using a web browser, search for "houston gis data" and select the result as shown below or or go directly to: https://cohgis-mycity.opendata.arcgis.com/.
Whenever you see a URL that ends in opendata.arcgis.com, you will know that you are visiting a standard ArcGIS Open Data portal.
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- In the ' Find
- Search for Data' box, type "historic sites" and press Enter.
- Click
- the second option for COH HISTORIC SITES/LANDMARKS, as shown below.
- In the middle right of the page, click Download > Shapefile.
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- Using a web browser, search for "h-gac gis" and select the result as shown below or go directly to: http://www.h-gac.com/rds/gis-applications-and-data/gis-datasets.aspx.
- Under the 'Dataset Categories' section, click the Hydrologic button to filter the results by subject.
- Under the 'Datasets' section, click Major Rivers.
- Click Download Dataset in the pop-up window.
- Click the blue Download button in the top right corner of the new window.
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The National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) provides free online access to summary statistics and GIS boundary files for U.S. censuses and other nationwide surveys from 1790 through the present. NHGIS datasets are large and require additional processing steps for use in ArcGIS Pro. Therefore, a sample of this data will be provided later in this tutorial. If you are in interested in using NHGIS data for your project, please visit the GDC lab or use this link to book an appointment at the GDC for further assistance: https://library.rice.edu/services/gis-assistance
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Once you have downloaded the historic sites from COHGIS Open Data Portal and the major rivers data from H-GAC, you will be able to find the data files in your Downloads folder. You will see that all the files are zipped, meaning they contain compressed files of data within them (you can tell a file is zipped when the file type column reads “Compressed (zipped) Folder”). You will need to unzip the folders to be able to see the data inside them.
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- In the Catalog pane, under the Folders section, click the arrow to expand Folders > Intro_Part2 > Intro_Part2.gdb. You will notice there is no data in the geodatabase. Over the next few steps, we will bring import the data we downloaded online from the Downloads folder to our Project Geodatabase.
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- In the Catalog pane, right-click Folders and select Add Folder Connection.
- In the left column click Computer This PC. In the right column, click Downloads and click OK.
- In the Catalog pane, expand Downloads.
- Fully expand all folders and geodatabases in the Downloads folder.
- We will repeat the above process to connect to a folder containing a sample of NHGIS data. In the Catalog pane, right-click Folders and select Add Folder Connection.
- In the left column click This PC. In the right column, click gisdata (\\file-rnas.rice.edu)(R) > Short_Courses_HIST207 > HIST207_GDC2 > NHGIS_Data and click OK.
- In the Catalog pane, expand NHGIS_Data.
- Your 'Folders' directory should look like the below.
Exploring GIS Data File Formats
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