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  Building Locationaries™ from Feature Classes
  Locationaries are currently implemented as theme-independent polygon shapefiles. They are theme-independent in the sense that, unlike conventional feature classes, they can contain all sorts of polygon features, including parcels, buffered roads, buffered name places, etc. The only common characteristics between those features is that they all have to:
  1. Be polygonal. The polygon geometry represents the minimum geographic extent where the spelling is valid.
  2. Have a text field called "NAME" containing the dictionary word.
  3. Be in the same coordinate system.

Locationary features don't have to be features visible in the real world. They can represent any word that has a geographically limited extent of spelling validity. The polygon represents the minimum area where such spelling is accurate. For example, the word "color" is valid in the USA, but not in other English-speaking countries where it is spelled "colour".  Therefore the "color" Locationary feature polygon will bound the USA.

Converting feature classes into a Locationary™

  1. Identify data sources
  2. Make a copy that you will edit to conform to the Locationary™ format requirements
  3. Set the 2D or 3D coordinate system of the feature class if it's not already defined
  4. If necessary, create a text field called "NAME" and copy those values into that field. One word per record.
  5. Optionally, delete all other fields from the feature class
  6. Buffer the feature class by a distance within which you consider those words to be correctly spelled
  7. If you are going to use data from different feature classes, use the Simple Data Loader in ArcCatalog, or Copy & Paste in an ArcMap edit session, or the Append tool from ArcToolbox to place all those features in a single feature class
  8. Repeat steps 1-6 for additional feature classes
  9. Export the resulting feature class into a shapefile if not already in that format
  10. Rename the shapefile as User_Polygon_Locationary
  11. Place the shapefile where the MapSpeller™ software expects it to be.
Important Note
 
The Locationary coordinate system must be defined (documented) within ArcGIS and cannot be of type "Unknown". 
 
Related Topic
 
Distributing user Locationaries
MapSpeller™ 3 for ArcGIS®
Page last updated on February 10, 2010
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