The data sets are gathered from S drive 1996 Census of Greater Vancouver Region District.  Data sets are seperated into three folders: metadata, data, and gen.

The folder gen contains the base map for the analysis, named ct96.rst.  The Metadata folder contains information regarding what the columns of the data in the data folder actually means.  And Data is the one where all the Census data are gathered.

First when I first dealt with data in the Data folder, I found that the Census table are all in Microsoft Access format.  I therefore opened the relevant database, and converted them into the most recent format of Access database.  While it is possible to manually enter each of each field into a separate IDRISI Attribute Value File, the process would in fact be tedious.  There is also great risk in wrongly entering centain value during the process.

As a result, I tried copying the fields from Access to Microsoft Word, using copy and paste, it however did not seem to work.  As a result, instead of copying onto Word directly, I copied the fields onto Microsoft Excel.  After doing so I then copy the data (now in spreadsheet format) onto Word again, and convert the Excel data table into text.

It finally worked after some trial and errors.  So then I tried importing these simple text of numbers onto an IDRISI Attribute Value File.  It worked again, with a message saying that some blank lines were deleted from the (ASSIGN) operation.  I checked and compared the values in the attribute file with the original unconverted Access database file, the two appeared to be identical.
 
 
 

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