Data Collection
In general, most of the data are derived from both 355-Data and GIS
Data folders under S:// drive.
1. Population Density
The first procedure is to collect data from 355-Data
folder, under the subdivided folders as Data, gvrd, 1996, data, ct. There
are many files, in which all data from census tracts are set in 15 tables.
I only need the table 1 for population density. In fact, each
table may contain data of unique subjects such as population and martial
status in table 1. Therefore, I need to identify which data is population
density.
2. Income by Activity
The income data is extracted in the same format as Population
Density but only one thing is different while the table 1 is changed to
table 13.
3. Competitors
Although no large-scale casino locates in GVRD, the small-scale
casinos can be found in 19 different regions in Vancouver, Richmond, New
Westminister, Coquitlam, Burnaby. Competition is a major issue in my
casino business. On the other hand, the government may not allow to
open the casino if it affects on the revenues of the small-scale casinos.
Therefore, I find all the exact locations of these small-scale casinos
from website: www.mybc.com and then use their postal codes to restrict these
areas for my casino location.
4. Hotels
If locating my casino in proximity to the major and high
class hotels, this should attract many tourists to gambling while most of
them will spend a little portion of money on gambling as entertainment. And
also, the casino analysts, who wrote a proposal for building a new casino
in Vancouver, projected at least 25000 tourists would visit the casino in
a day so the casino might help to bring additional revenue to the hotels
during the slow winter months. In this case, I find the 30 most famous
hotels in GVRD, which most of them are more than three star classes, then
I collect their addresses and postal codes from the website: www.mybc.com/.
By applying their postal codes in ArcView program, the locations of
hotels will pop up on the GVRD map, which is needed to convert these vector
data to raster data then.
5. Landuse
One important thing to be considered is the distances
of the residential areas, school zones, parks and so on. As given
from the GEOG 355 folder in the S:// drive, there is one folder called "gen".
I click into "landuse" that displays all features such as residential
single family, commerical, industrial and so on, in the IDRISI program.
6. Major Roads
Accessibility to major roads is one of the primarily considerations
for opening a new business because the location of my casino closer to
the major roads enables to grasp the gambler's eyes. The data of
the major roads stored in "gen" folder under "gvrd" folder is in raster
format and can be opened in IDRISI.
Other valuable websites:
http://www.navegantegroup.com/bcnews.htm
http://www.hoteldiscount.com
http://www.gisdevelopment.net/application/geology/mineral/geom0002.htm
http://www.leidenuniv.nl/interfac/cml/chainet/toolmca.htm
http://statcan.ca/start.html