GEOG 245: Geographic Information Systems

Fall 2010
Lab 06

Exercise 6 Point data and accuracy assessment

30 Points
Part 1: Importing and plotting point data (10 points)
In Part 1, you will create a map of My 10 (or so) favorite places in Hamilton using the
GPS data that you collected during the class, and XY coordinate data that you will collect
on the web.
1. Using GPS Utility software (Tutorial Part I), save your point data again, this time, as a
csv file using decimal degrees (D.dddddd). To do so, follow the Tutorial up to Fig. 4;
then show the x-y locations using LatLong and D.dddddd. The datum should be kept as
WGS 84. Then select Save As under the file menu, and select Garmin POI (*.csv) as file
format. Click OK. Open the file using Excel. Modify the table so that it looks similar to
Fig. 1. You can also include the fourth column that contains text information (e.g., My
room, Ho Science, etc.). Keep about 5 most favorite places on campus in the table,
and delete the rest.

Fig. 1
2. I would like you to add about 5 more favorite places within the Village of Hamilton
outside of the campus by getting XY data on the Internet. There are various ways to
obtain coordinates from Google Maps and other websites (which often embed Google
Maps within), and we will use one of the simpler ones in this exercise.

On Firefox, go to: http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html

Zoom into Hamilton, NY (You might want to choose the Hybrid view mode)
If you right-click the mouse, then you will see the locations latitude and longitude
in the boxes below. (Note: Google Maps uses WGS84 datum)
Copy and past the coordinates onto the Excel table, which already has the GPS data.
Save and close the csv file.

3. Finally, use the XTools to add a few places you dislike the most on campus or in the
village, using Part 3 of the tutorial. This is best done after you import the favorite
locations data, and the base maps are added to ArcMap (see below).
What to hand in:
Using the knowledge that you gained from the tutorial, create a color map showing your
favorite places in the Hamilton Village area (your map does not need to include the long
strip of the incorporated land for the airport). Your map should show the point locations

GEOG 245: Geographic Information Systems

Fall 2010
Lab 06
of the favorite places (about 10 places), a few places you dislike, names of those places,
and any other appropriate map elements. Feel free to incorporate any photographs into
the map (Insert -> Picture).
For the base map, you may use any or all of the following shapefiles (lab folder). You
will notice that these maps do not have the identical coordinate systems, and you may
need to define and/or transform some of the maps coordinate systems.

madison_parcels (land parcels in Madison County)

census_place (census Place boundaries, one of which approximates the boundaries

of Hamilton Village)

colgateblg (polygons depicting Colgates building foot prints)

Madison_roads (lines depicting roads in Madison County)

Part 2: Accuracy assessment using point field data (20 points)
Found buried in the ground during the Ho Science Center excavation two years
ago was a list of point locations and their land cover type from back in 1935. Lucky for
us, each point is labeled as building, forest, non-forest, and water. Since these data are
old, they are referenced to the New York State Plan coordinate system (central zone) and
the units of the eastings and northings are feet (the metric system didnt exist then).
Oddly though, their datum is NAD83. I have transcribed the information into a tab
delimited text file (field.txt included in zip file).
Your task is to use these data to assess the accuracy of your classification from
last weeks digitizing lab. More specifically, please generate an error matrix for your
classification. The tutorial preceding this exercise should provide you with the
techniques you need to collect the data for this assessment. You need to think through
how one constructs an error matrix. Remember that the field.txt file tells you what was
actually at each point in 1935 (Field Data). Your digitized map tells you what YOU
thought was there in 1935 (Recorded Data).
What to hand in:
Please hand in an error matrix table for your data and brief summary of your
results (200 words or fewer). Be sure to summarize important information in the error
matrix. Which class was most/least accurate? Which classes were most often confused?
Demonstrate your understanding of the difference between the producer accuracy and the
user accuracy while describing the results. Speculate why these errors occur for the
different land cover classes. Use the following example as a template of your table.

GEOG 245: Geographic Information Systems

Fall 2010
Lab 06