XY Coordinates and Geocoding

XY Coordinates

This section of the lab served as a way to learn how to take known coordinates and import them as points into ArcGIS.  I started by making an excel spreadsheet with known locations of eagle nests in Santa Rosa County, Florida.  I used the spreadsheet to convert the coordinates from the degree, minutes, seconds format to the decimal degrees format that works better with ArcGIS.  I then added this new data into ArcGIS by using the "XY Point Data" tool.  I then reprojected the data to the NAD 1983 (2011) StatePlane Florida North FIPD 0903 (US Feet) projection.

Location of Eagle Nests in Santa Rosa County, Florida

Geocoding

In this lab we generated our own data from addresses pulled off of the Florida Department of Education website.  I took the list of schools located in Brevard county and pasted them into a excel spreadsheet.  From there, I had to clean up the data so that individual pieces of information were parsed out into their own cells.  To do this, I used excel formulas such as =offset, =right, and =mid to pull out parts of the addresses.  I saved this cleaned up file as a .csv.

I then got all lines shapefile Brevard county that I would later use to find addresses from the US Census Bureau.  I also got a shapefile for the county so that I could show the county's outline on the map.  I reprojected these files to the to NAD1983 Harn State Plane Florida East FIPS
0901 Feet projection.

The next step was to set up the address locator using the "Create Address Locator" tool with the all lines file for the reference data.  After that, I geocoded the imported table with the addresses of the schools.  Most of the schools matched automatically, but there were a handful that did not.  For these I took the street name and searched the attributes table of the all lines file for a match.  Then I would also put the address in to Google Maps to see the exact location of the school.  From there I could find where the point for the school should be and added it into my own map.

Location of Schools in Brevard County, Florida

The completed version of this map can be view here.