Deleware Data

Looking at all this data and trying to use it in ways that the tutorials used data, will make it easier and be helpful when working on the final coarse project. Some of these are out of order, don’t want to confuse you…

Annexation: This data looks kind of silly, cause it just sections of that may or may not be a part of Delaware now, compared to 1983. These are kind of set up like grid plots. They are areas of the county, that are technically no longer part of Delaware County, compared to the 1983 data.

Deleware_Schools: This layer shows in schools in the county. The schools are more spread out in the larger block groups, and contain more schools in the smaller groups because this where a larger population is and the needs for schools is greater here. More schools means less overcrowding in classrooms.

Deleware_Municipalities: This layer shows marked territories that may consist of cities or towns within the county. This layer shows that there are only a few small municipalities in county, maybe that is where all the farmland comes into play.

Deleware_Golfcourses: This layer obviously shows golfcourses and is useful to be people like my dad who spend every weekend; saturday, sunday, or both playing golf. You eventually may get bored going to a single course and can locate different courses, and even those that hopefully won’t have any annoying teenagers goofing around.

Census Block: These consists of small units within the county and are usually bounded by blocks or streets. This data includes the whole county and has a county outline.

Census Block Groups: These are groups of census blocks, maybe based on rural areas to urban areas. They separate by the amount of citizens in each block, and may group them so that more populous areas are smaller groups, to distribute as evenly as possible.

Census Tract: This is a subdivision in a county that has a specifiend number of citizens, usually 4,000 but may also contain 2,500 to 8,000 depending on the county.

Delaware_Address_Pts: These are points of address locations, or houses where people live, this could also include apartment buildings. This shows you how the census is distribution based on a point.

Delaware_Buildings_1 and 2: This layer shows buildings in the county. Not all of the buildings are shown, more than likely major buildings in the city or county. Such things as City Hall and Courthouse.

Deleware_Cemetaries: This is an obvious layer, it shows cemetaries in the county. This could be useful if you’re trying to map the location a large census group, to see if most people live near or further away from cemetaries.

Deleware_Conversion: The only file I could get to work was the arch.shp file. I’m not clear on what it means by arch, but there are a lot of them compared to cemetaries and buildings. Could this be an impass where there is a “bridge” when one road or highway crosses over another?

Deleware_farmlots: This shows farmlots in Deleware County. I am a little confused if every grid on this map is a farmlot, because if so, then the entire county is made up nothing but farmlots, which is obviously impossible, esp. since City Hall would sit in the middle of one of those farmlots.

Deleware_Parcels: This layer shows area based on territories that may be described by deeds or other documents. The gray are parcels owned by someone based on a document or deed and the green are “open” land that are not definded by documents.

Deleware_Parks: There are two layers, plots and parks. The plots are the “center” of the park area. A park can cover a large area and can be described by that area or a certain point within the area, that can be located at the center. This point may sometimes be a park office or main lodge type building, but most likely a random point.

Deleware_PostOffice: This layer shows United States Post Offices in the county. You can use this layer if you’re looking for the nearest post office to speed to on the night before taxes are due.

Deleware_Subdivisions: This is a layer of subdivisions, where rural neighborhoods are built kind of separate from other neighborhoods and all of the houses look alike, which is also means you better be careful not to walk into someone else’s house accidentally and see something you shouldn’t. Schools are found near these subdivisions.

Floodplains: This has five shape files in it. These layers show the different waterways and where the floodplains or areas that could easily be flooded are located. This is useful if you are looking to build a house or buy and business and don’t want to buy property in the floodplain.

Historical_Archeological: This layer shows points of data that archeology related and historical to the area. Since there is a lot of geology and country land in Delaware county you can find quite a few points. The points are spread throughout the county, but clustered in groups of few, you don’t see very many single points with no other points near.

Historical_Deleware: Thes are points of historical importance to the County, not the area or land. These could have to do with battles or fights fought, first settlements within the county and stuff like that.

Historical_National: These are points of sgnificant historical importance to the country, that are located in Deleware County. There are fewer of these points, obviously, because points important to Deleware, may not be considered important on a national level.

Hydro-detail: I added everyone of these shape files to a separate map, because there were so many of them. I am guessing they show groundwater, wells and stuff across the county.

Master_Point: This is only one point, which marks (I’m guessing) the center of the entire county. This is useful for locating and placing important county buildings to be the most accessible to everyone that lives in the county.

National Heritage ODNR: I’m not sure what this layer does. I do know that, it looks like a single dot, that is right with the master point, but when you zoom in, it is a bunch of points very close together. The master point is also a group of points bunched together.

OrthophotoAp2006: There were two layers in this folder, but neither would come up in GIS. They both caused ArcMap to freeze up and wouldn’t respond, I had to restart everything over.

Precinct: An enclosed space that can have real boundaries surrounding it, like walls, or imaginary boundaries that can’t be seen. These are much like the census blocks and block groups, except it is not based on census data.

Public Land Survey System: This layer contains domains that the land in the county was split into by the federal government. The way the land is split into the domain depends on the area and surrounding area, so the specifications may vary. Most of the domains look very similar in shape and size except for along the boundary on the left side of the county.

Railroads: This shows major railroad lines. there are only a few, which mainly run north and south. Before suburbanization and interstates, railroads were a main source of transportation, but most have been torn up. Some areas use the paths after the tracks of torn up to create bike paths, which is perfect, calling it rails to trails, which can be found all over the country.

School: This layer shows school as an area. The specific schools aren’t listed, but when you look at the attribute table, you can see that the each school covers a certain area of the county, based on the surrounding population and size it can withstand. The separation in school districts, when you live within a certain you must send your child to a certain school, unless you go to the school board and give them a plausible reason.

Soils: This layer compares good farming soil, potential soil, and basically land that has no soil, or the soil isn’t fertile for any kind of planting. This is good for farming mapping and placement.

Topography: This layer has the topography separated based on the different townships in the county. According to this the areas in the south and east are flatter while the areas to the north and west have more mountains and steeper slopes.

Historical_townships: This shows the original 18 townships in the county. Most of the boundaries haven’t changed, just the liberty township became liberty north and libert south.

Traffic-MORPSE: This shows the different traffic zones in the county. My guess would be that these zones are split for when state highway patrol go on duty in a part. area or zone, they are restricted to that zone, except for emergencies. The areas are not evenly distributed, which I am sure has to do with populations in certain areas.

Watersheds-ODNR: This shows the watersheds in the county. They cover most of the county, except for a small section on the left border in the Scioto township.

Wetlands: This layer has two shape files. It took awhile to get them in GIS because the raster data needed to make pyramids to make it work. They didn’t really look like pyramids to me. The one layer shows the value data for the land and the other place the actual wetlands within the land values. They are pretty evenly spread throughout the county.

Woodlands-ODNR: This layer shows areas of woodlands. Woodland is spread throughout the county, but no area is very big. I wanted to check out the biggest area of woodland, so I opened the attribute table and sorted descending for the area column. The highest area value was 1.24 x 10^7 (I think it was measured in m or km) either way, this is not very big.

Zip2004: This layer shows the different zipcode boundaries as of 2004. The zipcodes have much larger groups than the townships. Multiple townships are located within a single zipcode area and the lines do not folow the boundaries, not even county boundaries.

Zoning: This layer has two shape files. Zoning in a location with the id 0200 and historical zoning, I am guessing for the same area. The 0200 layer looks to be zoning for Deleware township or city, maybe a little larger, and the historical zoning layer is so small you have to zoom in to see it. Obviously the city grew.

Well that’s all for the Deleware Data, I looked and fiddled around with most everything I could, except for the few that wouldn’t pop up in GIS. This information could be useful in my coarse project.