Monday, September 6, 2010

Special Topics in GIS Project 1: Air Pollution, Ashtma and Race in San Francisco Bay Area

The following links were created for the first assignment in the University of West Florida's 2010 GIS Certification Program on-line course, Special Topics in GIS which began in the Fall 2010 semester.

The Special Topics class focuses on longer term projects centered on s specific area - the San Francisco Bay Area. The first project focuses on public health via a study that uses GIS to examine whether there is any correlation between asthma admittance rates in the nine counties that comprise the San Francisco bay area, air quality (based on ozone and particulate matter data) and racial demographics. The study initiators are local county hosptial officials who are looking into data to help develop resource allocation budgets for the county hospital system.

The prepare phase of the project required preparing demographic, air quality and asthma admittance data from various sources such as publications and the internet into a format that coud be utilized by the GIS and connected to spatial data utilized by the GIS (in this case the county geospatial data).

As all the GIS datasets were being created or altered from exiosting datasets, one of the project requirements was to update the metadata associated with each data file to reflects it's relevence to the current project and to provide future possible users of the data a way to understand what data was incorporated in the study for validation purposes.

What is posted here are the metadata files for all the datasets anticipated to be used in the project:

Demographics
Asthma Rates
Monthly Ozone
Particulate Matter

Bay Area Counties Shapefile
Bay Area Hospitals Shapefile
Bay Area Monitoring Stations Shapefile

In addition to ther preperaption of the data sets and the metadata, the Prepare phase required the production of a preliminary Process summary outlining the steps taken from inception to completion of the study and presentation of the data.

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