34,79 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
ArcGIS Pro is a geographic information system for working with maps and geographic information. This book will help you create visually stunning maps that increase the
legibility of the stories being mapped and introduce visual and design concepts into
a traditionally scientific, data-driven process. The book begins by outlining the steps
of gathering data from authoritative sources and lays out the workflow of creating a great map. Once the plan is in place you will learn how to organize the Contents Pane in ArcGIS Pro and identify the steps involved in streamlining the production process. Then you will learn Cartographic Design techniques using ArcGIS Pro's feature set to organize the
page structure and create a custom set of color swatches. You will be then exposed
to the techniques required to ensure your data is clear and legible no matter the size
or scale of your map. The later chapters will help you understand the various projection
systems, trade-offs between them, and the proper applications of them to make sure
your maps are accurate and visually appealing. Finally, you will be introduced
to the ArcGIS Online ecosystem and how ArcGIS Pro can utilize it within the
application. You will learn Smart Mapping, a new feature of ArcGIS Online that will
help you to make maps that are visually stunning and useful.
By the end of this book, you will feel more confident in making appropriate cartographic decisions.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 302
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
How Maps Get Made
Knowing your audience
Clear expectations
Setting yourself up for a great map
Data management is important
Project folder structure
Project file naming
Finding authoritative datasets
Searching the web for authoritative data
ArcGIS Online
Outlining the work ahead
Summary
Getting Started in ArcGIS Pro
Opening a project
Organizing the Contents pane
Adding data to your map
Arranging layers
Renaming layers
Working in the Map View
Symbolizing layers
Adding a little something extra
Symbolizing multiple values
Setting bookmarks
Transitioning to the Layout View
Page setup
Working with map frames
Creating a map output
Adding map elements
Sharing your map
Practice on your own
Summary
Organizing the Page Structure
Beginning the mapping process
Achieving good design
Finding balance
Establishing harmony
Creating unity
Working with multiple data frames
Planning out your map
Practice on your own
Summary
Typographic Principles
Using type on maps
Understanding letterforms
Choosing and pairing fonts
Choosing fonts
Pairing fonts
Building map grammar
Labeling in ArcGIS Pro
Working with point features
Working with line features
Working with area features
Titles and other map elements
Practice on your own
Summary
Picking Colors with Confidence
Defining color
Color models
Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (CMYK) 
Red, Green, Blue (RGB)
Hue, Saturation, Value (HSV)
Hexadecimal
Setting colors in Pro
Color wheel
Warm and cool colors
Complementary colors
Working with color
Color theory
Color as a visual variable
Color schemes
Color schemes in ArcGIS Pro
Importing schemes
Color as accent
Moving beyond the basics
Value-by-alpha
Sophisticated spot color
Color moods
Color acuity
Practice on your own
Summary
All Maps Are Approximations of Reality
Determining the style of your map
Better understanding of your map
Reference maps
Thematic maps
Special purpose maps
Maybe changing it a little will help make it clearer
Reducing noise
To default basemap or not to default basemap
Generalizing boundaries
Labeling
Scale of your data
Normalizing data
Aggregating data
Aggregation methods
Boundary
Heat map
Grid
Hex bins
Summary
Understanding and Choosing Projections
The world is round, and maps are flat
The deceiving classroom map
Reconciling 3D to 2D
Geographic coordinate systems
Geoid
Spheroid
Datum
Transformations
Projected coordinate systems
Cylindrical
Conic
Planar
Distortion
State plane coordinate systems
Choosing a projection
Scale of your data
Coordinate system properties
Elevation or the Z
Vertical coordinate systems
Tidal datums
Summary
Clean Symbology and Uncluttered Maps
Representing features with graphics
Symbol systems and symbol conventions
Scales of measurement
Visual variables
Point symbols
Line symbols
Area symbols
Classifying data
Proportional and graduated symbols
Making symbols dynamic
Controlling visibility at scale
Attribute-driven symbology
Practicing on your own
Summary
Getting Started with ArcGIS Online
ArcGIS Online
The components of ArcGIS Online
Data tier
GIS tier
Web tier
Web GIS services
Feature layer
Tile layer
Scene layer
Elevation layer
ArcGIS Online overview
Accounts
Public account
Organizational account
Levels, roles, and privileges
Levels
Roles
Privileges
The organization
Gallery
Map
Scene
Groups
Content
Organization
The item description page
Web maps
Publishing a GIS service and creating a web map
Summary
Leveraging Esri Smart Mapping
Smart mapping
Understanding your data and the story you want to tell
Using smart mapping
Choosing the attribute data to display
Location
Heat map
Categories
Types (Unique Symbols)
Types and size
Numbers
Counts and Amounts (Color)
Counts and Amounts (Size)
Color and Size
Compare A to B
Predominant Category
Predominant category and size
Time
Continuous Timeline (Color)
Continuous Timeline (Size)
Age (Color)
Age (Size)
Color (age) and size, and color and size (age)
Smart mapping automatic colors
Arcade
Using math expressions
Using date expressions
Summary
Other Books You May Enjoy
Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
How Maps Get Made
It was only a short time ago that the visualization of geographic information system (GIS) data was almost exclusively physical, data was hard to come by, and the audience of a map was a single person or a small group or community. The pervasiveness of web mapping in recent years shows that the general public is getting more accustomed to static and dynamic maps showing more than the route from A to B. In this chapter, you will learn how to tailor your map to your audience, find authoritative data to support what you are trying to convey, and create a work plan to structure your data in an organized way to create the best mapping product.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Knowing your audience
Setting yourself up for a great map
The importance of data management
Finding authoritative datasets
Outlining the work ahead
Knowing your audience
While every mapmaker strives to make the most visually appealing map they can imagine, you have to remember that the purpose of a map is to convey data clearly to your audience. In my career, I have made maps for planners, engineers, rangers, hydrologists, lawyers, field crews, surveyors, elected officials, and the public, just to name a few. If I was working on one project that involved all of those groups, each map of that project would be different than the other. Finding out who the audience of a map is? should be one of your first objectives.
With this figured out, you have a clearer goal of what data you will need and how to show it. Don't be afraid to ask questions; a lot of times you can be pulled into a project in which you have no background. It is more appropriate to ask a lot of questions in the beginning, rather than in the middle or towards the end of a project.
I typically ask the following questions when I get pulled into a project:
Who is the audience of the map?
What are you trying to show?
Does any data already exist?
Will there be any analysis?
Will this be updated regularly to show progress/change?
With these questions answered, I can usually feel comfortable enough to start a project. This will help me form a guide on how to formulate a work plan to solve this mapping problem.
Clear expectations
Because mapping is becoming more accessible to people, there is a higher demand for it. People understand the power of showing data on a map, but may not understand the complexity of creating a great map. It is important to lay out realistic expectations when creating a map. It is really easy to put too much information into a map, which will only confuse the audience, and make the map look poor, as well. Not that it's impossible to have a lot of data in your map; it just takes a lot longer than most people expect and skills learned over many years of cartography experience.
A lot of people, myself included, can get excited about a project and want to immediately start working on it. Going out looking for any and all data or starting the design of the layout may be exciting, but this eagerness can cost you in the long run, as you will perform work that might not be used in the project. The beginning of a mapping project should move slowly at first, to mitigate unnecessary work.
Setting yourself up for a great map
ArcGIS Pro is a powerful desktop software that has been built from the ground up to allow a GIS professional to have a single place to deliver mapping products across multiple platforms. ArcGIS Pro was designed to be easier to approach for those who may have not come up using the soon to be legacy ArcGIS for Desktop suite. ArcGIS Pro uses a more scalable project management model from the beginning. This new model sets you up with an environment to store, reference, or process project-relevant data logically in multiple workspaces under one project.
For instance, with ArcGIS Desktop, you would have one map layout per MXD file. In a project that may need multiple maps, you would have to create an MXD for each map. Typically, you would store relevant MXDs with each other in a folder system on your local machine, or more preferably, a network drive. You would have to run multiple instances of ArcMap to make changes to them all, and unless you explicitly saved it, all the data connections and toolbars would stay on your local machine. With ArcGIS Pro, you store all your maps, workspaces, and data connections in one project in the .aprx file. That makes it easier for you or someone else to open the project up somewhere else and have the same environment.
Data management is important
Before you start working on your project, you need to set up a logical folder and file-naming convention. This is a very important step, because as you may have experienced in the past, you can get pulled into something else and shelve a project for a length of time and lose a lot of memory of how things were done. This also helps in case someone else has to come in and pick up where you left off.
Project folder structure
If your organization has a defined folder structure on how to manage folders and files, use that structure, but if you are given a free range, I highly recommend coming up with a folder structure that will help you keep files organized. In the past, most of everything was in the shapefile format, so you would typically organize by the theme of the data. Today, ArcGIS Pro will automatically create a geodatabase file when you create a new project, giving you a place to store your project data. I will usually create another geodatabase file to be my scratch area and leave the original geodatabase file as my final project data.
Whenever I receive data from someplace, I start a folder called original and create a folder with the name of the source and make the files read-only. This has saved me a few times when I received or found data, made a change to it and couldn't revert. Now I don't have to remember where I got the data or find the person who sent it to me originally. I usually create folders for each type of file I receive, for example, KML, LYRX, SHP, raster, and so on.
If you feel comfortable with a folder structure already, by all means, use it; just keep it consistent! Consistency is key when organizing things.
Project file naming
Just like making sure your folder structure is organized in a logical way, your file naming must follow a logical pattern to be successful. We've all been there, running geoprocesses all day, sometimes tweaking settings multiple times. At the end, you see all the files with the suffixes _export, _export2, _clip, _merge, and so on, and if you have a program crash or a forced restart, you will have a hard time trying to figure out which one you were using. Forcing yourself to take the five seconds to change the filename to something more descriptive will save many seconds/minutes/hours down the line. What I show will be a guide; change it as you need to, and just remember to be consistent!
My four keys to file naming:
No spaces or special characters
Use camel case or snake case
When including a date, use a date prefix like
yyyymmdd
If processing data, enter the process name and any major settings (for example,
20171002_City_Limits_Buffer_10mi
)
While today's software is smart enough to ignore spaces or special characters, there is still legacy software that will fail because of them. An added benefit of not using spaces is when you send a network path of a file or folder to someone, a link will automatically be generated in most email clients. If there is a space in the URL, it may create a link using all the characters up to the space, creating an invalid link. Use camel or snake case for legibility, and when appropriate, use the yyyymmdd date prefix. Having the date in that format allows you to sort by name and have the dated data show chronologically. Finally, putting in the process name with major settings allows you to quickly and easily find the particular data you processed. Now that we have thought about our folder structure and file-naming conventions, let's put them to use by finding data to populate our project!
Finding authoritative datasets
Sharing GIS data was a difficult proposition in the past, as if you didn't have your own infrastructure, there wasn't a central place where people could share GIS data. This meant that most data lived as a hyperlink to a .zip file of a shapefile or a .kmz file, being hidden deep within a website not devoted to GIS. The age of the file was sometimes unknown, because there was no metadata or nothing on the website that told you whether the files were being updated or when they were created. With the introduction of ArcGIS Online, people and organizations have a central place where they can share GIS data and give the burden of hosting and serving the data to Esri. There are also many websites that use open-source solutions to serve out data in the form of a web mapping service (WMS) or a web feature service (WFS).
Searching the web for authoritative data
With GIS being more accessible, and with more demand for GIS data, it truly is a good time for the GIS professional. However, you must be wary of datasets—How they were created? If they are maintained? And/or whether the data is complete or not? Inspect every dataset to find:
Metadata, if available
Who created the data?
Do field names make sense, or do you need a key/lookup table for them?
What scale was the data drawn at?
What is the accuracy, spatially and mathematically?
What is the licensing of the data?
These are some of the questions you should ask yourself when searching out data online.
Not all of your data needs are going to be useful as static files on your file server or local machine. It may be that the data you need is too large or changes so often you'd rather not have to go out every day/week/month to download the newest version. There is a lot of dynamic data being served out in the web, so when you access it, you are always getting the most up-to-date data and only getting the data you need. Not having to store the data locally and being able to just pull the data from a server can be very advantageous. For example, if you want to create a map showing the current weather, it may not be necessary to keep the weather data for a historical archive. The purpose of the map is to show current weather, so you pull live data from a governmental body or commercial provider to overlay your map. That way, if it's a web map, you don't have to worry about keeping things up to date, and if it's a layer in a static map, every time you export or print it will show the updated data. This works well when GIS is needed in an operations center where a large map is printed every so often.
Some of the biggest GIS data creators are governments. Many governments produce a whole lot of data, but most have one flaw. They don't advertise it well. Thankfully, search engine crawlers do a great job of digging deep into complex government websites and allowing us to search for the keywords we are looking for. Adding keywords like shapefile, geodatabase, GIS, REST, WMS, and WFS to what you are trying to find can make searching quicker. In the United States, you can use https://data.gov to search against a large amount of federal, state, county, and local data. In Europe, you have https://data.europa.eu or https://www.europeandataportal.eu.
ArcGIS Online
Esri has a data repository called the Living Atlas, which contains curated data from Esri that you can use in your maps. The majority of these datasets are available to the public, but there are a few datasets in Living Atlas that are either subscriber content or premium content. The last two types of Living Atlas datasets require you to have an ArcGIS organizational account and/or credits available. Warning! Be careful with credit consumption; it can add up real quick and can drain your organization's credits. You can access the Living Atlas data two ways:
Through ArcGIS Pro
At
https://arcgis.com
In ArcGIS Pro, you can access the data through the Catalog pane under Portal by clicking on the icon with the book on top of a cloud, shown as the following:
You can also search for Living Atlas on ArcGIS Online to find datasets. A great feature of ArcGIS Online is being able to find a layer there and open it within ArcGIS Pro automatically. We will go into more depth on this in Chapter 9, Get Started with ArcGIS Online. ArcGIS Online also has data from people and organizations around the world. Because they chose to leverage ArcGIS Online to host their data, you can be sure that it will come into your map in ArcGIS Pro with little to no configuration. ArcGIS Pro was designed around consuming data from GIS servers just as much as it was designed for local data.
Outlining the work ahead
Since beginning this chapter, you have already asked a lot of questions, and have hopefully received all your answers so that you can begin working on your map or maps. You have considered who the audience of the map is, what you need to show, that data already exists, and if you will need to recreate this map later.
You will finish off the rest of this chapter going through a scenario where you need to create a map for a report that your marketing manager is putting together. The marketing manager needs a simple map showing the population density of all the states of the contiguous United States (lower 48) and Alaska, using a single color ramp to fit on a US letter-size paper in landscape. The marketing manager said that it just needs to be a basic map, as the focus will be on the report and not the map. This is a quick and easy task in ArcGIS Pro.
First, let's open ArcGIS Pro and sign in:
After signing in, we need to follow the following steps:
Once signed in, you are asked to create a new project. You'll want to choose the
Map.aptx
template.
Let's make sure to give a descriptive name for this map. You want to be able to tell what it is for just by looking at the filename.
Let's call this
PopulationDensityForMarketingReport
and store it in a folder for our ArcGIS projects.
Leave the checkbox checked to create a new folder for this
Map
project.
You now have a simple map showing the United States. Now you need to find your state data, with population density. Luckily, ArcGIS Online's Living Atlas that you learned about earlier has the data you need:
To find it, go to the
Catalog
pane on the right and click
Portal.
Click on the icon with the green book on top of a cloud (shown in
Figure 1.1)
.
Once the
Living Atlas
data is populated, you will see an item called
USA States (Generalized)
; right-click it and select
Add to Current Map
.
This will bring the data into the map's table of contents. You will need to expand the
USA States (Generalized)
layer and right-click the
USA_States_Generalized
item and select
Attribute Table
to open up the attribute table. You will see the table pop up from the bottom, and you can inspect the fields available:
After looking at the fields, we can see a field called POP10_SQMI, which gives you the population per square mile from 2010. This was the data your market manager was looking for. Now you just need to symbolize the states using a single color ramp:
To do this, you right-click
USA_States_Generalized,
and then click
Symbology.
The pane on the right side of
ArcGIS Pro
will show you the symbology properties of the
USA_States_Generalized
layer, as seen in the following screenshot:
Click in the drop-down where it says
Single Symbol
and change it to
Graduated Colors
. You will see the map change and see that you now have new settings in the
Symbology Properties
pane.
Since you want to show the population density, you should change the drop-down next to
Field
to
POP10_SQMI
. Choose a single color ramp of your choice, and you are almost ready to send out this map.
You have put data into a map, but right now, the map isn't put into a layout. A layout is where you would insert your map and other items, like a legend, scale bar, north arrow, and title:
To create a layout, click
Insert
from the top of the
ArcGIS Pro
ribbon, click
New Layout
, then choose
Letter
under
ANSI Landscape
. A new window will appear with the title
Layout
. Right now it is blank, because we have yet to insert your map into it.
To insert your map, you will click the icon above
Map Frame
. You now see the map with your data, and luckily, it shows the data to an extent where you can see the contiguous United States and Alaska. Now you just need to insert a north arrow, scale bar, and title.
To insert a north arrow, click the
North Arrow
icon; this will place a basic north arrow into your layout. Let's move it to the bottom-left corner of the map; to do this, click and hold on the north arrow, then drag it to the lower-left corner.
You will need to add a scale bar by clicking the
Scale Bar
icon, next to where the
North Arrow
icon was. This will add a scale bar to the middle of the map; you will move it to the bottom-left corner of the map, just like you did with the north arrow.
You will need to add a legend so the reader knows what the colors mean. To insert a legend, click the
Legend
icon. Unlike the north arrow and scale bar, you will click and drag within the layout to insert your legend. You will place the legend in the top-right corner of the map, where you have a bit of room. Click the top-right corner of the map and drag down to the left to create the legend. You can resize it if it's too small or too large.
You need to change the layer label and field label to look a little nicer in the legend and be more descriptive. To do this, expand the
Map Frame
item in the contents pane. Perform a slow double-click on
USA_States_Generalized
and change it to
States
. Then perform a slow double-click on
POP10_SQMI
and change it to
Population per square mile
.
Finally, you need a title. To create one, click the
Text
icon in the
Insert
ribbon, which is a white square with the symbol
Aa
. In the drop-down menu, select
Title Larg
e
(Sans Serif)
. Then click
Text
next to the white square and click right above the map in the white space and start typing
2010 Population Density by State
, then click the white space of the map. Click and drag the text so that it is centered over the map.
Now you need to export the map to PDF. To do this, click
Share
in the ribbon, then click
Layout
, which has a green arrow icon. Navigate to your project directory and name the file
PopulationDensityMapLandscapeAnsiLetter.pdf
.
By following these steps, you have created the map that the marketing manager was looking for. While this map may not win any cartographic contests, it clearly shows the data requested, and we have a descriptive title. Not every map needs to be a perfect cartographic product. The best map is one that clearly shows the author's message:
Summary
In this chapter, you learned to make sure you know your audience, what questions to ask, and what expectations to set when starting a mapping project. You learned the value of proper folder structure and naming conventions. You learned how to source authoritative data from a few places, and finally, you put all that knowledge into making a quick map for your marketing manager.
In the next chapter, you will go more in-depth on how to use ArcGIS Pro and how to make better looking maps with more advanced settings.
Getting Started in ArcGIS Pro
An important part of any map creation is good data organization. This begins with good file management and continues with managing layers in your workspace. As we noted in Chapter 1, How Maps Get Made, good file naming and organizational practices are critical to streamlining your mapping process. If you are working on your computer's hard drive, you may wish to set up a folder dedicated to your ArcPro projects (for example, C:\ArcProProjects). If you are working in an organizational server environment, create a folder according to your organization's file management policies.
ArcPro allows you to organize your project through the Contents pane, the Map View, and the Layout View. The Contents pane allows you to list your data layers in a variety of ways by drawing order, data source, and more. The Map View, like the Data View in ArcMap, is where you can see your data layers from a single Map Frame, geographically aligned and as they will appear in your final map. The Layout View is where you will assemble your final map output (with one or more map frames), add map elements, and finalize output for print or screen. In this chapter, we'll look at each in detail and practice organizing data for cartographic purposes.
A key feature of ArcPro is the ability to easily interface with ArcGIS Online and share data within your organization or publicly. Its new project file format also allows you to create multiple layouts with the same map frame and reuse map frames and layouts in multiple projects, which can save you time if you work with the same data regularly.
In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:
Opening a project
Organizing the Contents pane
Working in the Map View
Transitioning to the Layout View
Creating a map output
Opening a project
Let's open an existing project and take a look at the ArcPro interface. When you first launch the application, you'll be asked to sign in with your ArcGIS Online account (if you don't want to sign in each time, check Sign me in automatically).
On the opening screen, select Open another project. From the folder where you installed the sample data, select GettingStarted:
Once your project opens, it may look familiar to you if you use Microsoft Office. This is not accidental, but part of a collaboration between Esri and Microsoft. Across the top, you'll find the ribbon and tabs (Project, Map, Insert, Analysis, View, Edit, Imagery, and Share) in one or more panes. The panes and ribbon are context-sensitive and will change depending on what tools or features are selected. The bottom half of the window is still fairly similar to ArcMap. At the left is the Contents pane.
To the right is the Map View. (If you do not see the Contents pane, it may be turned off. To turn it on, click View|Contents). If you are familiar with ArcMap's interface and functionality, you may find the page http://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/get-started/migrate-to-arcgis-pro.htm helpful:
Organizing the Contents pane
Within the Contents pane, the information is organized into a nested or tree structure. The top-level is the name of this particular map. Underneath it are the various layers or files that make up this map, listed in a particular order, determined by the selection chosen under the search box. Since we're viewing our layers by drawing order, these are listed in the order in which they are stacked up to make the map (we'll look at the other options later). Notice that each item has a small triangle to the left, which allows you to expand or collapse each item. Each layer can be expanded to view the symbology for that layer or collapsed to view just the layer name.
A key element of working with any mapping or design software is layer management. ArcPro lets you easily see your data layers, along with symbology and other details, in the Contents pane. The buttons underneath the Search bar change the way in which the data layers are displayed—by drawing order, file location, selectability, edit status, snapping, labeling, and chart content. Hover your mouse over each button to find out what it does. For now, make sure Drawing Order is selected:
As we can see in, Figure 2.2, the Contents pane tree begins with US Counties, the name of this map. Underneath that the data layers that compose this map are listed. In this map, there is only one data layer so far, US Counties. Underneath the layer name is a colored square representing the symbol for that layer.
In complex maps, you may want to condense the Contents pane in order to see more information. You can reveal and hide the legend information (for example, the symbol properties, such as shading for areas or the shape used for the point) for a layer by clicking on the triangle next to the layer name. Click to reveal the legend; click again to hide it.
Across the top of the window, you'll see tabs labeled US Counties and North America. US Counties and North America are map frames, which are essentially individual maps made up of one or more map layers. In ArcMap, these were displayed as separate data frames within the same Contents pane. In the case of the project file you just opened, each tab contains one map. This will allow you to create and combine maps into a variety of layouts, which will be discussed later in the Transitioning to the layout view section. A Map Frame can comprise any of the data files (for example, shapefiles, coverages, and rasters) that can be added to ArcPro.
Click the North America Map tab to view it. When you are done, click the US Counties Map tab.
In the ArcPro work environment, the ribbon and tools are anchored to the top of the program window. The tabs are context-sensitive and will change depending on what you are doing. You may notice some tabs appear when you click on certain things and disappear when you click away.
Take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the menus and buttons located within the ArcPro window. To find out a button's name (and functionality), move the cursor over it. After a few seconds, the button command name will appear near the button and a brief description of the command will appear in a pop-up box near the tool. You may notice that some menu items and buttons are grayed out, or appear and disappear. Some menus and buttons are available only during specific situations.
By default, ArcPro does not display all of the available tools. To see a full list of available tools, click Project|Options|Customize the Ribbon.
Adding data to your map
Let's add a data layer to the US Counties map. Before we do, let's make sure ArcPro knows where your files are located. In the Catalog pane, expand Folders and see whether your data folder is shown.
If not, don't worry; your files are still where you left them! Right-click on Folders and select Add Folder Connection (don't see the Catalog pane? Click View|Catalog|Catalog Pane):
Browse to your folder and
single
-
click it, then click
OK
(if you accidentally double-clicked, you will get a
This container is empty
message, and you will need to back up one level and single-click your folder):
Once you're connected to your folder, you're ready to add data to your map.
Click the
Add Data
button t
o add a data layer
:
The
Add Data
window will now appear. Browse to your newly connected folder:
All three of the files have the .shp extension. These are shapefiles. Shapefiles contain vector data commonly used in GIS software. Vector data is data where points (either single points on a map, or vertices) are represented by coordinates. Common vector features include points, lines, and polygons.
Although only one filename appears with a .shp extension, shapefiles are actually collections of related files. When viewed in File Explorer, you will see all of the related files (as seen in the following figure). ArcGIS treats all of these files as a single object. For this reason, it is helpful to work with files in Catalog, rather than File Explorer, so none of the pieces get lost:
Let's add the USstates layer to the
