Assignment 4: Introducing ArcMap

The ArcMap tutorial produced a poster about proposed airport expansion.

I found the ArcMap tutorial very interesting.  The process of going through all these tools really revealed how powerful a GIS system can be.  I thought there were many points where I could see many additional uses for the functionality we were learning.  For example, the population density that was retrieved from a table and joined based on ID was extremely powerful.  It made showing very numerical and hard to visualize data on a map incredibly easy because the computer would map the colors and pair the correct population values with each region.  This long tutorial also made me appreciate the complexity and challenge of such an advanced GIS system.

This GIS system had incredible functionality and many uses.  GIS is able to make a strong translation between data and visuals.  This is incredibly important as it is hard for many of us to comprehend purely data driven presentations such as tables and calculations.  A map or visualization of data is often critical to our understanding and ArcMap really helps make this possible.  GIS can transform powerful data sets and months of research into a presentable form.  The maps created out of these GIS systems are incredibly diverse, as the tools are rich and complex.  A map can be made for any purpose with the ubiquity of GIS.

The drawback is complexity with GIS systems.  Even through several hours of tutorial, it can be easily seen that this amount of complex creation of maps is time consuming.  The users of GIS that understand it completely must still work for many hours to produce a final result.  This is a major improvement over old mapping techniques however, where the many hours would still result in discrepancies between data and the final map.  Here at least, GIS keeps track of the data carefully, and the resulting map will always be drawn according to the data you desire.

Overall, I feel GIS systems are extremely powerful and beneficial.  The power of computing is becoming increasingly important in the modern age, and I think GIS is a crucial step in harnessing that power to visualize and show data.  More and more data is becoming available as we integrate computers into our everyday lives.  With this quantity of information, it is important to have tools like GIS that can decode, display and quantify it.  The incredible power of GIS is that so much computation can be done through computers, leaving us to think about the higher abstract concepts and ramifications of results rather than having to focus solely on computation and analysis.  I think GIS is the only way forward in a data heavy world.