Some Concepts That Underpin GIS - Introducing Geographic Information Systems with ArcGIS - page 69

Use the ArcGIS Metadata to look at the ESRI 29 feature class information for Soils. How many
features are there? ________. Look at the ESRI Thumbnail for a picture of the feature class.
What are the names of the attributes (the Field names) of the feature class Soils, as shown
under ArcGIS Metadata—ESRI Fields and Subtypes?
___________________________________________________
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9. The Wildcat_Boat.mdb, where mdb is the extension for a personal geographic database, 30 is a
geodatabase with two feature data sets (Area_Features and Line_Features). The Area_Features
feature data set contains one feature class, Soils, and the Line_Features feature data set
contains three feature classes: Roads, Sewers, and Streams. You know you are in the ___IGIS-
Arc_ YourInitials folder because you can verify the Wildcat_Boat.mdb's location by glancing at the
Catalog Tree, the location toolbar at the top of the ArcCatalog window, or the title bar for the
ArcCatalog window itself.
So, you can see that you have quite a hierarchy going on here: Your folder contains a folder (Wildcat_Boat_
Data) that contains a personal database; the personal database contains two feature data sets; each
feature data set contains one or more feature classes. Visually the hierarchy looks like Figure 1-34. So,
you have the Soils, Roads, Sewers, and Streams that you need for the Wildcat Boat facility problem. Let's
look at some of the data.
FIGURE 1-34
29 It is worth noting, for those who may be confused by the fact that I sometimes say ESRI and sometimes Esri, that the
company changed its name from Environmental Systems Research Institute (acronym ESRI) to simply Esri,
pronounced variously “ezri,” “esri,” or with the letters sounded out “E-S-R-I”.
30 As you have seen you also use File Geodatabases. The filename extension for those is gdb, which stands for
Geographic DataBase. File Databases use a variety of types of database software; Personal Geodatabases use only the
Microsoft Access database (mdb).