This week's lab was a lot more difficult than last week's lab exercise. While Googlemap was relatively straightforward and easy to understand, GIS was really difficult and confusing for me even with the tutorial.This further reinforces the point that neogeography is for amateurs while GIS is for professionals. Even though it is quite complicated to use, GIS has proven to be an effective and helpful mapping tool.
A problem I encountered while doing the lab was saving the data onto different computers, so when I opened my completed project on another computer some of the data and the graph were no longer present. I ended up having to redo the whole thing several times to finally get it right. Another problem I had was not being able to undo some of the things such as color changes and had to change it back manually.
GIS has great potential in helping users understand the spatial relationship between a place and its attributes through the use of maps. It lets users incorporate graphs and maps together to better understand and solve real-world situations. For example, the map for this lab exercise is used to help people understand the relationship between the airport noise and its surrounding population so that measures can be taken to solve this problem. GIS is extremely helpful in mapping out data, visualizing the relationship between data, and analyzing the data.
Despite its potentials, GIS contains certain pitfalls as well. First of all, GIS is not user-friendly for first-time users. A lot of steps have to be taken to perform a simple operation. The program can be very confusing for amateurs unless they go through the tutorial several times. Another downside of GIS is that it is not easily accessible by the public since the program is quite expensive. Therefore, GIS is mostly utilized by professionals and the government to understand real-life problems and develop ways to solve them.
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