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Figure 3.8 Geodesic (in red) and Euclidean (in blue) buffers around Detroit, Michigan.
Source: Esri base map.
In the next section, you will use GIS to site the optimal location for a high-
speed Internet café in Denver. The activity includes buffering features as
discussed in this chapter, as well as querying, computing summaries, classifi-
cation, and other techniques central to spatial mathematics.
3.5.3 Siting an Internet café in Denver
The activity involving the siting of an Internet café in Denver, linked near
the end of this chapter, uses spatial analysis in a GIS environment to (1)
download, format, and use data from the Esri Data depository, and (2) site an
Internet cafe in Denver using the downloaded data, considering demograph-
ics, traffic volume, and proximity to educational institutions. This exercise
is more advanced than are many of the others in this topic. Readers with
previous experience using GIS software should benefit from that experience.
To complete the entire exercise requires about three hours and we assume
that the reader has access to ArcGIS 9 or later. In the body of the text, here,
we present a few of the elements of this activity and encourage the reader to
participate in the full activity, now, or after reading more of this topic. Indeed,
we shall refer to it, and present other parts of it, later.
Locating any business in a metropolitan area requires a consideration of spatial
factors, and therefore, GIS is an essential tool to bring analytical capabilities
to the problem. These include: Downloading, formatting, and understanding
Census TIGER spatial data and US Census demographic data, joining attribute
tables, tabular and spatial sorting and querying, overlay and proximity analy-
sis, creating map layouts, and most important, solving a problem based on
spatial analysis.
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