The Chicago Public Schools needed to create maps for reports and presentations displaying geographic dispersion of dollars allocated for various school renovation projects. Unfortunately, the data was either not in a GIS format or was not in ArcView Shapefiles. Additionally, the Chicago Public Schools were under a deadline to accomplish this and did not have the necessary resource available to do the work.

The work for the Chicago Public Schools had three distinct phases. The first was to convert existing MapInfo data to ArcView Shapefiles. This was done using standard import routines available in ArcView.

The second phase included the geocoding of all Chicago’s schools. Once again automated routines available in ArcView were used to do the bulk of the work, but not all of the schools were able to be accurately geocoded. To place these schools, manual insertion and attribution of the school locations was done.

Finally, Great Arc generated maps in ArcView to visually represent the geographic dispersion of dollars allocated for various school renovation projects. This was done using built-in map-making functionality in ArcView.