As GIS professionals, it’s probably safe to say that we appreciate the spatial nature of things; the concepts of location, proximity, and contiguity permeate the way we think when trying to understand data and solve problems.
But what about time? Everything happens somewhere and at some time, doesn’t it?
The temporal nature of our data can work in conjunction with the spatial to help us better model and understand the world through our screens. This information usually comes to us in the form of date fields. Much like the latitude, longitude, and shape fields that kick off our location adventures, date fields can be the launching point to interesting analysis and answering important questions.
This blog and short video will show you how to work with date fields in Data Engineering in ArcGIS Pro. We’ll highlight the following:
- List and visualize date fields – Use the Fields Panel to quickly identify and explore date fields, creating appropriate charts to visualize temporal patterns.
- Format and prepare date fields – Prepare your data for spatiotemporal analysis by extracting date information from text fields.
- Inspect date fields using summary statistics – Learn more about each date field in the Statistics Panel by seeing the range, mean, count of unique values, and mode.
The best way to get started is likely by seeing it in action, so put on some slippers, get under a warm blanket, and check out the following video:
The video is just the beginning: you can, for example, extract weekdays from date fields by accessing the Convert Time Field tool, or continue your analysis with the Space Time Pattern Mining tools.
If you already work with date fields, you now have additional tools at your disposal as you map and analyze space and time. If you’re just getting started, it’s a perfect time to get up to speed.
Stay tuned for our next post where we explore the mysteries of nulls in our data.
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