In a separate blog entry, I discussed the use of ArcGIS Explorer (http://www.esri.com/arcgisexplorer) to map the addresses or hometowns of students in your class. But today’s geotechnologies allow you to go so much deeper. Think about the other things on the landscape that you could map and analyze spatially.

Something easy and powerful to analyze spatially is the location of businesses. Businesses are located in specific areas and therefore have specific patterns. For example, what spatial pattern would bail bond services have in a city? I used http://www.dexknows.com to obtain an address of the bail bond businesses in Oklahoma City. I pasted the data from the web pages into a comma-delimited text file including the following fields: business name, street address, city, state, and zip code.

The above image shows the location of the bail bonds in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, mapped with a police siren symbol using the Import File function in ArcGIS Explorer.

Would your students hypothesize that these services would be more likely to be located near prisons? That was my hypothesis, and so I found out via the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office website that the state’s largest detention center is indeed located in Oklahoma City, is workplace for 450 employees, occupies 268,000 square feet, and has a capacity for 2,950 inmates. After failing to find the prison address on the site, I found its latitude-longitude coordinates via wikimapia.org, complete with its location on a satellite image. In ArcGIS Explorer, I used the “Go To Location” function under “Tools”, entered the latitude and longitude, and symbolized the result with a Police Station symbol.

Compare this pattern to that of another type of business. I mapped car washes using Dexknows as my address source.

As expected, the pattern of car washes is much more diffuse than that of bail bond services.

It is easy to use ArcGIS Explorer to analyze businesses in a spatial context and I encourage you to try this in your curriculum.

- Joseph Kerski, Education Manager