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.
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.
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.
If you choose to download the tutorial data from the source websites and practice finding and obtaining data from online sources, follow these instructions:
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.
Whenever you see a URL that ends in opendata.arcgis.com, you will know that you are visiting a standard ArcGIS Open Data portal.
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.
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:
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
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
If you are completing this tutorial from a computer in Fondren Library and are logged in using the gistrain profile, follow the instructions below:
If you are completing this tutorial from a personal computer, you will need to download the tutorial data online by following the instructions below:
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.
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:
Census_2010_By_SuperNeighborhood
Major_Roads
METRO_GIS_Data_Layers
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.
Tabs, groups buttons, panes, views
Exploring GIS Data File Formats
Previewing GIS data Using the Catalog View
previewing metadata & projections
previewing features
Examining GIS Data Coordinate systems
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