When Yes Does Equal No
It has been a crazy week so far and I apologize for the lack of posts. I hope to be back on track tomorrow.
We are working on a regional master plan and I had to create a map using some GIS data that was given to us by various governmental agencies. In the pile of shapefiles was a dataset showing future transportation corridors, simple enough to add to a map or so I thought. I couldn’t get the map to look anything like that was on the website where we got the dataset from. After spinning my wheels for a little bit, I went ahead and called the organization to find out how to use this simple dataset. Most of the fields were blank so I couldn’t figure out how to query the dataset to get it to appear correctly. After talking with the GIS manager he remembered that particular layer and told me to calculate the field named “YES” = ‘no’.
Of course on closer look, you’ll notice that YES can also equal ‘ ‘ or ‘ye’ (the text field is only 2 characters so YES will never equal ‘yes’). I need to reach for some aspirin right. 
I’m laughing only because I feel your pain. I had a similar dataset where “True” = ‘FALSE’ to display some special species of concern.
This is part of the reason why I’m sympathetic to ESRI when users complain about the core software - they expect ArcMap to deal with whatever weirdness they have created.
I’ve thought this was a strange disconnect for a while - in your typical organization, tabular database design (say for an assessor system) is given to a database designer, or contracted out. But the design of the base spatial datasets is left to the intern and the “GIS Coordinator” who may have attended a 2 day ESRI course, after getting a BA in geography. Then people wonder about how you get field names which make no sense, or relationships which can not be mapped, or poor performance etc.
I just think that if you are going to live with something for a while (base datasets, a house, whatever) you likely want to consult someone who has experience designing such things so you will avoid common pitfalls…. such as Yes = No
Just my 2 cents…
Dave
Good ‘nuf for gov’ment work! Ha ha ha ha!
I just spent 20 minutes explaining to someone that they had a DVD chockfull of files with no documentation whatsoever. They didn’t even know how to view it, let alone try to figure out what the files represented. Fortunately, this is becoming somewhat less commonplace than it used to, as everybody is finally at least aware that they should be providing metadata. Still an uphill climb though.