Hi there!
I am a college student with a cursory familiarity with ArcGIS 10 (i.e., I took an intro class).
Here is my scenario
I started with a table in a database that contained a large number of historical water main failure data stretching back to the late seventies containing a number of attributes and an address. After pulling out those addresses, I located each record by geocoding or finding the lat/long by hand an displaying the records by hand. I now have a shapefile displaying all these datapoints.
Here is my problem
I have a shapefile layer for all the historical main failure data, but I want a layer that is easily updatable for future main breaks. The break data will have lat/long data from a GPS unit, and I know I can update the shapefile by inputting a new .dbf, displaying x,y data, merging the old and new shapefile layers, and deleting the old shapefile. However, I was wondering if there were any way to use a personal geodatabase to streamline the updating process. The new main failure data will be appended into a Microsoft Access data base file, if that makes any difference.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! I am not a computer scientist (getting a B.A. in Environmental Engineering), so I am still pretty foggy on how geodatabases and databases in general work.
Thanks!
-Matt
I am a college student with a cursory familiarity with ArcGIS 10 (i.e., I took an intro class).
Here is my scenario
I started with a table in a database that contained a large number of historical water main failure data stretching back to the late seventies containing a number of attributes and an address. After pulling out those addresses, I located each record by geocoding or finding the lat/long by hand an displaying the records by hand. I now have a shapefile displaying all these datapoints.
Here is my problem
I have a shapefile layer for all the historical main failure data, but I want a layer that is easily updatable for future main breaks. The break data will have lat/long data from a GPS unit, and I know I can update the shapefile by inputting a new .dbf, displaying x,y data, merging the old and new shapefile layers, and deleting the old shapefile. However, I was wondering if there were any way to use a personal geodatabase to streamline the updating process. The new main failure data will be appended into a Microsoft Access data base file, if that makes any difference.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! I am not a computer scientist (getting a B.A. in Environmental Engineering), so I am still pretty foggy on how geodatabases and databases in general work.
Thanks!
-Matt