A lot of people have used many of the mapping Internet sites to find locations. You probably know the site. Type in an address or driving instructions and you get a map of the vicinity. To help things out, often the service will let you know about hotels or restaurants in the vicinity.

Maporama offers may of the same features. Type an address and get the location.

But there's also a little twist. In the results screen, in the bottom left corner, Maporama also returns the latitude and longitude of the search location. (or, sometimes, a location that's really close) These locations are a quick replacement if you don't have time to drive around and get the coordinates.

Now, what can you do with this? Well, it's data. Get enough of it, and you have a database. With a big database, you can manipulate it with Fathom! So, what if one was to take all of the school locations along with the school populations? You could plop it into Fathom and start to work with it.

One thing might be to put the latitude and longitude on the axes and then drop school populations right in the middle and let Fathom plot it.

Below is a chart of Greater Essex County elementary schools. What's that little purple dot?

If you hop over to the GECDSB website, you'll find a map.

Back to the Fathom graphic. Copy it into Adobe Photoshop Elements and with a little editing, get rid of the axes and the background from your Fathom image and put it right over top of the map.

Two things should be immediately obvious. We now know the name of the purple school and we also know that the map on the website isn't exactly to scale. Pelee Island is actually further out in Lake Erie. GIS never lies!

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12