Good Example but not complete for Lab 5

Memorandum

To: Sally Diggrunt, Technical Project Director

From: ----------------------

Date: October 31, 2005

RE: Data Sources for Onondaga County Comprehensive Plan

As per your request, I have investigated potential data sources for the revision of Onondaga County’s comprehensive plan, to be carried out by the Onondaga County Planning Committee. Find attached a table listing for each data set the file name, description, year of relevance, the modifications I made, the original file formats, original datum and coordinate system, indication of whether file is raster or vector, scale denominator or resolution, and the data type of the primary attribute. Files listed in the table have been posted on the company server for your use.

All files were originally found online on the Cornell University Geospatial Information Repository (CUGIR) website or on the New York State GIS Clearinghouse site. All files not originally in this coordinate system have been converted to UTM 18N NAD 83; this modification has been indicated on the table. Any files with an extent greater than Onondaga County were clipped to this region in order to save storage space. Clipping was performed with a simple polygon I digitized that completely encompasses the county boundaries; this file is listed first in the table.

Because transforming data is imperfect, those files that have been converted from NAD27 or another datum to NAD83 may not align properly to those files originally in NAD83. Depending on the scale desired, this may or may not be a significant problem when it comes time to analyze the data.

Computer problems significantly lengthened this task, as I had the misfortune to time looking for the files while CUGIR was revising its website. This task took X hours. Please notify me if you have any questions or concerns about this data.