The primary task for this exercise is generalizing the polygons used to represent a set of islands. The secondary tasks include importing and exporting using ESRI’s proprietary exchange format, converting to geodatabase feature classes, and exploring ArcGIS generalization facilities within ArcGIS Pro.
This exercise uses ArcGIS generalization tools in both ArcGIS Pro and Jupyter Notebooks. And it consists of discovering the range of generalization utilities available, discerning their differences and evaluating different approaches to line simplification.
- Obtain the data andros.e00
- Transfer the data from E00 to a geodatabase or shapefile by creating a new
Spatial ETL tool, selecting E00 as the import data format, ESRI shapefile or File Geodatabase as the output format. - Simplify the coastline so that it appropriately represents the Andros Islands at a scale of
1:1,500,000. This operation will probably include some combination of line simplification, polygon removal, polygon aggregation, and it might even include collapsing polygons into lines. - Export the final generalization products as a file geodatabase in ArcGIS Pro.
Esri provides amazing functionality through their two libraries, arcpy and arcgis. The [arcpy](http://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/arcpy/get-started/what-is-arcpy-.htm) library is proprietary and provides the full suite of functions that exist within ArcPro (or if it doesn't, I haven't found that yet). The [arcgis](https://developers.arcgis.com/python/) library provides a subset of that functionality, but is completely free. In this notebook, we will only focus on arcpy.
Objectives in the Jupyter Notebook:
- Be able to call functions from arcpy through Jupyter notebook
- be able to set environment workspace
- understand arcpy is a library that needs to be imported
- be able to use help documentation to understand function syntax
- Reflect on Jupyter; compare and contrast with accessing GIS through Pro