Potential and Pitfalls
GIS has a lot of potential in using gathered data to produce a meaningful map. A map that can articulate and answer questions. Through GIS data output(maps), GIS has the ability to produce results of analyses to people who can make decisions about resources, networks, and etc.. Through prospective views and animations GIS conveys the earth and geographic information more effectively for decision making. GIS is a complex process of data entry and manipulation that results in a output for either professional analysis or a better understanding for the general public.
GIS is very effective in data management and data manipulation. When working in ArcGIS you can choose two different views to manage and edit your data. Layout view, which allows you to look at all your maps or data at once and compare characteristics. Or Data view, which allows you to focus on one individual data file at a time and add important data to that one file for better analysis later on in layout view. In this tutorial during the data view we focused on adding layers to add different data types to our maps. The layers in GIS help to characterize or differentiate the maps, through adding or labeling features. When you have more different layers on all of your maps it makes analysis a lot easier.
Another great potential of GIS abstraction, conveying real world objects onto the maps in ArcGIS through points, lines, and arcs on the map. In this particular tutorial for example, we had to edit a road by adding in lines. The drawing toolbar allows you to create or edit almost any object on the map. Which is very useful when planning things out in the real world, such as networks like water supply.
When a engineer or architect draws in a new plan on ArcGIS they can compare the newly drawn in date(proposed data) with the current situation to see how big of change it will be and how much supply is needed. ArcGIS's drawing tools allows professionals to plan ahead or to make current situations or data improved and better (as we did with the extension of the road).
Despite the potentials of GIS, there are of course some pitfalls that come with it also. First, when using ArcGIS I could not work on my laptop because it is not suited for Mac's. The software was also fairly slow and lagging even on windows computers, which made the navigation and organization a little harder. Second, the whole software doesn't seem that user friendly to me. After spending four plus hours on the software I went through a lot of frustrating steps that should have been relatively easy but were made difficult by lags or errors. Furthermore, every time I logged on my maps wouldn't be the same way I saved them and I would have to go through a few steps to restore the data. These are all very small pitfalls though and can easily be overcome, ArcGIS's potential outweighs the pitfalls certainly.
