Lab 4

This assignment was straightforward and a great exercise for learning how to digitize in ArcGIS. By this point, I’ve become much better at using ArcCatalog to create geodatabases and organize my data. Creating the new shapefiles and editing their attributes was not too difficult either. I was surprised at the simplicity of the whole process of digitizing by this method. However, I did face difficulties with the borders polygons and with the features’ labels.

The Cut Polygons Features tool was indispensable, but caused issues occasionally. Sometimes an error message would come up saying it could not distinguish between the right and left side. I am not sure why this happened, or what it meant, but got around the problem each time by adding a few more vertices along the shared border. I could not figure out the point of or how to use the Auto-Complete Polygon tool, but look forward to learning this week.

I didn’t have any issues with the Modify Feature option and it worked wonders in fixing the few minor errors I made initially. It made extending and shortening lines, adding and removing vertices, and modifying polygon shapes easy tasks. Snapping was also an indispensable tool. I set the setting to snap to the edges and end points of the Iraq polygon.