PROBLEMS
1) The most difficult part of the project is to collect the data wanted. They are either not there or troublesome to collect. For instance, I needed Canadian address locator so I can locate the schools (more than 200 of them) of the study area. Unfortunately much of the software is custom made for the American market and the smaller Canadian market does not warrant it. The Canadian address locator is available in the data library of UBC but not SFU.
2) I wanted to analyze which areas are prone to crime activities, but because of privacy and legal issues, the crime statistics are not available to the public. The only crime statistics that is available to the public is through the Vancouver Police Department, which only has the data in the Vancouver area. Therefore, this factor could not be included in the MCE analysis.
3) The shapefiles for the locations of public services (library, shopping centre, and hospital) were created manually by hand. Therefore, variations in other such reports and maps may exist.
4) Other than data collection, difficulties arose from data manipulation as well. Each layer needed to clipped, projected, rasterized, and converted and these processes were time consuming and repetitive.
5) The weights in the pairwise comparison were assigned mainly by personal assumption, which could influence the project accuracy significantly. It was for this reason why more than one MCE analysis was performed.
6) The HTML files created using Dreamweaver do not neccessary show the same, depending on which browser you are using to view them. Some codes only works on Internet Explorer but not Mozilla Firefox. This affects the graphic presentation of the project if the project is viewed with Mozilla Firefox.
7) Personally I think this project is not that complete because some criteria were left out due to the absence of available data. Other than these criteria, there must be even more criteria should be considered as well.