Digitizing a city map for thesis project; Transportaion

[Mir_AliTalpur]

Hello everyone !

So, basically I need a digitized map of a city that can be used for analysis. My thesis will be focusing on land-use destination, so I'll be needing the  fully  digitized map that has all kind of land-use categories plus the road networks, precisely the measurement of accessibility. The biggest hurdle that I've came across is, as I belong to the third world country i.e. Pakistan, the nonavailability of data for GIS. Besides, I am not an expert in the GIS. However, I am major in urban planning.

Things that I would like to ask are:

1. How can I extract image for the study area?
2. How can I digitize the map in the fastest way?

Regards.

Mir Ali.

[khadijahnas]

1.  Draw a shape of the boundary area then crop the image within the boundary.

2. The fastest way is pay any student to help you digitize the map

[RichardFairhurst]

You should georeference the image in ArcGIS to align any image you have to your base map projection.  For the best results your control points should be generally in either the horizontal plane or the vertical plane of the base map only, and you should avoid control point locations that form diagonal lines across the base map.  You can then digitize the image manually and get a reasonable fit to your base map.

If the scanned image of the land use map is high enough quality and has boundaries that are crisp with strong contrast you can export the georeferenced image as a black and white image and try an autotrace program to make a first pass at the image.  You could check out a program like Autotrace that is free (although I have not tried it myself).  I have used Adobe Illustrator to do this on occasion.  However, I have found that the output will still need a fair amount of manual clean up, especially if the original image was in color and significantly enlarged to fit the map.  Attributes from the map like zoning codes or planning designations also have to be added manually to the output.