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TABLE OF CONTENTS

This guide was created by the staff of the GIS/Data Center at Rice University and is to be used for individual educational purposes only. The steps outlined in this guide require access to ArcGIS Pro software and data that is available both online and at Fondren Library.

The following text styles are used throughout the guide:

Explanatory text appears in a regular font.

  1. Instruction text is numbered.
  2. Required actions are underlined.
  3. Objects of the actions are in bold.

Folder and file names are in italics.

Names of Programs, Windows, Panes, Views, or Buttons are Capitalized.

'Names of windows or entry fields are in single quotation marks.'

"Text to be typed appears in double quotation marks."

This course will teach you how to download, evaluate, and prepare GIS data from public online sources and set up a project in ArcGIS Pro.

Obtaining Tutorial Data

There are three ways of obtaining the tutorial data. The best option for getting the full GIS project experience is to follow Option 1 and learn how to download data from online GIS data portals. You will also gain exposure to the best GIS data websites for the Houston region. If you have limited time or if any of the data provider websites are not functional, you may get a download an identical version directly from the computers in the GIS/Data Center or online from this wiki. Follow the applicable set of instructions below depending on the particular computer you are using.

OPTION 1: Obtaining tutorial data from source websites

If you choose to download the tutorial data from the source websites and practice finding and obtaining data from online sources, follow these instructions:

COHGIS Open Data Portal

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.

  1. 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.

  1. If you are looking for specific data, you can enter a term in the search box, but if you would like to see the full data catalog, click the Search button without entering a search term. You can then browse through the full list of data or filter by topic on the left side.

In this case, we are looking for census data by super neighborhood. To learn more about super neighborhoods, visit the City of Houston Super Neighbhorhoods webpage.

  1. In the 'Find' box, type "census 2010 by super neighborhood" and press Enter.



  2. Click Census 2010 By SuperNeighborhood, as shown below.



  3. In the top right, click Download > Shapefile.

H-GAC GIS Datasets

The Houston-Galveston Area Council (H-GAC) is the 13-county Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for the Houston region. Federal legislation requires that an MPO be designated for each urbanized area with a population greater than 50,000 people (as established by the U.S. Census Bureau) in order to conduct long-range metropolitan transportation planning and be eligible for Federal funding for transportation projects. Their mission to carry out metropolitan transportation planning means that MPOs are a great source of data on topics such as demographics, employment, land use, transportation, and environmental conditions and most of these topics are well-suited towards GIS analysis.

Most of the data provided on the H-GAC portal is not originally created by the H-GAC, but rather is either aggregated from multiple municipalities up to the 13-country region, or clipped from the country or state down to the 13-county region.

  1. 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-data/gis-datasets.aspx.



  2. Under the Dataset Categories section, click the Transportation button to filter the results by subject.
  3. Under the Datasets section, click Major Roads.
  4. Click Download Dataset.
  5. Click the blue Download button.

Houston METRO Downloads

The Houston METRO website provides GIS data for the public transit system in Houston provided by METRO. For this tutorial, you will need the bus stops and bus routes data, which is included in the downloadable zip-file containing all of the GIS data available on the site. To obtain this data:

  1. Using a web browser, search for "houston metro gis" and select the result as shown below or go directly to: https://www.ridemetro.org/Pages/NewsDownloads.aspx.



  2. Scroll down to the bottom of the webpage and locate the Zipped Data Files section.

There are two links in this section that look promising: METRO GIS Data Layers and METRO GIS Data. From the perspective of a GIS user, there is nothing about those particular link names that is helpful in deducing which link to download. After testing both downloads, we determined that the Metro GIS Data download contains only the METRO service boundary, while the METRO GIS Data Layers download contains 

  1. Click METRO GIS Data Layers to download.

HCAD

Though it is not used in this course, the Harris County Appraisal District (HCAD) Public Data is another great online source that provides similar data such as highways, utilities, and water districts and is available at: http://pdata.hcad.org/GIS/index.html

OPTION 2: Accessing tutorial data from Fondren Library using the gistrain profile

If you are completing this tutorial from a computer in Fondren Library and are logged in using the gistrain profile, follow the instructions below:

  1. From the Start menu, click Computer > gisdata (\\file-rnas.rice.edu) (R:) > Short_Courses > Introduction_to_GIS_Data_Management.
  2. To create a personal copy of the tutorial data, drag the IntroTutorialData folder onto the Desktop.
  3. Close all windows.

OPTION 3: Accessing tutorial data online using a personal computer

If you are completing this tutorial from a personal computer, you will need to download the tutorial data online by following the instructions below:

  1. Using a web browser, go to the Introduction to GIS short course webpage at: http://library.rice.edu/gis-intro
  2. At the bottom of the webpage, under the Resources section, click the Introduction to GIS – Tutorial Data link to download the tutorial data.
  3. Unzip the IntroTutorialData folder.
  4. Copy the unzipped IntroTutorialData folder to your Desktop or another location of your choice. Ensure that you note the file path of the location you have selected.

Any time throughout the tutorial that you see reference to the file path C:\Users\gistrain\Desktop\IntroTutorialData, you will need to substitute it with the file path you have just selected.
The following step-by-step instructions and screenshots are based on the Windows 7 operating system with the Windows Classic desktop theme and ArcGIS for Desktop 10.1 SP1 software with an Advanced license. If your personal system configuration varies, you may experience minor differences from the instructions and screenshots.

Preparing the Downloaded Data for ArcGIS Pro

Once you have downloaded the Bus Stops and Bus Routes data from Houston METRO and the SuperNeighborhoods and Freeways data from COHGIS, you should 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. To do that:

  1. Open the Downloads folder.
  2. Ensure that you see the following zipped folders in your Downloads folder.

 

Census_2010_By_SuperNeighborhood

Major_Roads

METRO_GIS_Data_Layers

  1. Select all three folders.
  2. Right-click any of the selected folders and select 7-Zip > Extract here.

Discussion on why to extract in downloads folder, rather than project folder.

 

Your data should now be in a file folder in its decompressed format and ready to be brought into ArcGIS Pro.

Creating a New Project in ArcGIS Pro

  1. From the Start menu, launch ArcGIS Pro.
  2. When ArcGIS Pro opens, under the Create a new project section, click the Blank project template.
  3. In the 'Create a New Project' window, for Name, type "Intro".
  4. For Location, click the Browse... button to the right.
  5. In the 'Select a folder to store the project.' window, click Computer in the left column and click Desktop in the right column and click OK.



  6. ClickOK once again.
  7. Maximize the ArcGIS Pro application window.
  8. In the 

Exploring the ArcGIS Pro User Interface

Tabs, groups buttons, panes, views

Managing GIS Data

  1. In the Catalog pane on the right, expand Folders > Intro > Intro.gdb

Connecting to a folder

  1. Right-click Folders and select Add Folder Connection.
  2. In the left column click Computer. In the right column, click Downloads and click OK.
  3. In the Catalog pane, expand Downloads.
  4. Fully expand all folders and geodatabases in the Downloads folder.

Exploring GIS Data File Formats

Previewing GIS data Using the Catalog View

previewing metadata & projections

previewing features

Examining GIS Data Coordinate systems

Importing and Exporting Data in the Project Geodatabase

Importing (copying) Geodatabase Feature Classes into the project geodatabase

Importing (converting) shapefiles into the project geodatabse

Exporting geodatabase feature classes to shapefiles

Disconnecting from your Downloads folder

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