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Final Script Design
The final script which I have set out to create in my Programming course was designed mainly for archaeology contract work. Basically, it would allow the user to obtain quick geometry calculations pertaining to the amount of various disturbances within an archaeological study area (or APE).
The script would work in several distinct steps, first by creating a clip polygon of all input polygons within the given APE, create an area column, calculate the acreage of the overlap for each intersection (while at the same time creating an acreage of an entire APE), printing the results, creating another column in each of the clipped polygons (and writing the total Study Area acreage within it) as well as a percentage of coverage column, performing a division calculation to determine the percentage of the APE that each clip occupies and finally printing the second set of results. If all went smoothly in PythonWin, my intention was to revisit the later chapters and create a toolbox which would allow the user to use the script as a tool with manually-defined parameters.
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The image above shows the test run of the script, which is displaying notifications informing the programmer that each consecutive operation was carried out correctly.
Feature Modification
The example script shown above shows modification of features within ArcMap, by the use of Python alone. This assignment emphasized the use of several GIS tools through a python script. For the given assignment, I had to create a script from scratch that would recognize a workplace on the computer hard drive, and from this workspace it would perform the following functions:
-Add XY to a specific shapefile
-Create a 100 meter buffer around the points on the shapefile
-Dissolve all attributes of the buffers and turn the shapefile into a single feature.
Model Builder
In my programming course, I have been able to learn the dynamics of the Model Builder feature within ArcMap. The example pictured above shows the use of three distinct tools: Clip, Add Geometry Attributes, and Polygon To Raster.
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In this example, (which I have implemented for an archaeology course) the overlap of two shapefiles is clipped, the area of each overlap is calculated (and the acreage added to the attribute table), and finaly the data is converted to a raster. This allows me to gather spatial information about an area in question, as well as prepare a raster for further predictive analysis.
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