5 data consideration steps

We've spoken about the importance of data from different perspectives. Storing your data the geodatabase to gain access to tools for maintenance and administration or methods for collecting data easily and integrating into our enterprise database seamlessly.

As organisations, we ask questions of our data. Preparing our analysis workflow provides the key to the quality of the response and often hinges on our data and how well we understand what data we have and how ready it is to be used.  If our data is well conditioned we can use it quickly and be confident about the analysis output.

What data considerations should be made when designing our analysis workflow. There are five steps we can work towards.
1. Frame the question - Identify exactly what we are asking
2. Explore and prepare the data - understand what data is available in the organisation to assist in answering our question? What work is required to get the data in a useable format.
3. Chose methods and tools - Pinpoint what geoprocessing tools will be used to perform the analysis.
4. Perform the analysis
5. Examine and refine results - Not all questions are answered first go, how further can I refine my data and analysis to gain a complete answer to my question.

Want to know more? You may have used any one of the plethora of analysis tools in ArcGIS, but do you know exactly what you're asking for? How well are you interpreting the results? 

Performing Analysis with ArcGIS works through the five steps to better analysis.
You'll find it scheduled across the country over the next two months:

• Sydney 19 May
• Melbourne 25 May
• Adelaide 8 June
  

Stopping a Dekho log file becoming unmanageable

On support we have been asked a few times for a way to stop the log file from growing to an unmanageable size, so we have fiddled with the log4j properties file and have come up with a solution.

As well as rolling the log file after a particular size, you can have 2 separate logs for 2 dekho sites in the one Tomcat.

logging.properties file (C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 6.0\webapps\Dekho\WEB-INF\classes\resources):

# Set root category priority to INFO and its only appender to CONSOLE.
log4j.rootCategory=FATAL, CONSOLE

# Set the enterprise logger category to ERROR and its only appender to CONSOLE.
log4j.logger.org.apache=ERROR, ROLLINGFILE

# Dekho (and DASM) logging level, and output destination
log4j.logger.au.com.esriau.dekho=DEBUG, ROLLINGFILE

# Crystal Reports logging level, and output destination
log4j.logger.com.crystaldecisions=INFO, ROLLINGFILE

Find out more

No more searching for tools

There are many tools in ArcToolbox.  During a typical workflow of analysis or map production you will use a number of tools in a variety of tool boxes.  For tools that are not often used, it's fine to search and locate what’s needed.  But what about the tools that are used often, perhaps even daily?  It would be much easier to have one toolbox with all the tools most commonly used.

In ArcGIS you can create your own toolbox by right clicking on ArcToolbox and selecting New.  This creates a tool box that can be named according to use.  Right clicking on your new toolbox allows you to create a new toolset.  Just right click on a tool and copy it and then paste into the toolset or create a model to edit or just copy and paste stand alone tools.  If you want to reuse or share there is also the option of saving the toolbox to either a file or to the default (right click again on ArcToolbox).  It's up to you. 

For increased efficiency and ease of use, creating your own custom toolbox is the way to go.  Check out the video below on how you can create your own toolbox.