Friday, 8 January 2016

To teach or not to teach, that is the question

With apologies to The Bard, whilst the internet in general and YouTube in particular are great tools - I use them here and on YouTube myself - there is the danger of posting educational videos uncritically.

This is what the otherwise excellent Monde Geospatial aggregator and educational site posted as "Reprojection of ArcGIS shapefile using ERDAS Imagine": the unnamed authors "... have converted shapefile (Vector) having Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projection system to GCS (Geographic Coordinate System). This is tool is used to covert projection system of shapefile only, which is not supported for Arc Coverages or any other vector datasets..." (emphasis mine):



Might have said Yoda:  "... hmmm... hmmm... correct that is not!"
It took me about an hour before breakfast to source, map, reproject, post and blog what showed this to be untrue: Take US Gulf of Mexico Bureau of Ocean and Environment Management shape file extract of Offshore Blocks in NAD 83 UTM Zone 15. And reproject it to GCS NAD83 using ArcGIS 10.3 for Desktop Version 10.3.0.4322 Standard:



Note: no ESRI? Get ArcGIS for Home Use incl. ArcGIS Online for a Benjamin a year!

Update: according to YouTube it was posted by Owncollections, who appear to use ERDAS Imagine. It's great tool especially in image processing, but it's not needed for this exercise, unless you use ERDAS already of course.

Disclosure: local ERDAS reps SterlingGEO do #locallysource Safe FME Workbench, and they gave me nothing but excellent support, but I didn't need FME to do this either...
They say I have a secret life on the internet before breakfast - and that started 15 years ago when home  internet access via modem was not only slow but also competed with school kids in the afternoon and home users in the evening - but I'm an early riser, so... Anyone remember this sound? 
 

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