Digitizing and Editing Vector Data - Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools - page 78

Figure 5.7: Digitized streams with corrections

can see the result of fixing a dangle and reshaping the stream to better
match with the DRG. As you can see, it's pretty simple to correct mis-
takes in your data as you go and alter it to make it more precise when
your requirements dictate.

5.2 Editing Attribute Data

Now that we have digitized the lakes and streams, everything is in good
shape—except we have some problems with attributes associated with
the features. If you look at Figure 5.4 , on page 85 , you'll notice the lake
in the southeast corner of the map is named FLake Lake. Not only is
there a capital L in “FLake,” the actual name is supposed to be Fluke
Lake. We can correct this error using the editing capabilities built in to
the attribute table.

To fix the name of the lake, we simply open the attribute table for our
lakes layer and click the Start Editing button. Once we do that, any
of the items in the attribute table can be modified by clicking them
and changing the value. We change the name of the lake to Fluke Lake
like it's supposed to be and hit Enter to make the change stick. Once
we're done editing the table, click the Stop Editing button to save our
changes.

It was pretty easy to find the record that needed editing, since we had
only five lakes in our layer. What happens if we have 5,000? In that