DAs for localities

Question

I have a couple of questions, which I’m hoping someone with experience in geographical hierarchies might be able to answer -

I’ve been asked to find data on Wallaceburg, Ontario. According to GeoSuite Wallaceburg is a Locality and also an Urban Area. It’s in the CA of Chatham-Kent, which is untracted, so I’m presuming the only way to find data is through the DAs.

I have the reference map for Wallaceburg, and the DAs are marked, which solves part of the problem. However, I’ve ended up with a couple of questions I can’t answer.

First, although I can find the DAs which make up Wallaceburg by copying down the codes from the reference map, I thought there must be a more elegant way of producing a list. I can get a DA list for Chatham-Kent CA from GeoSuite, but not for Wallaceburg, presumably because DAs don’t roll up to localities or urban areas (although if I bring up a map of Wallaceburg on GeoSearch, I can ‘identify’ DAs within it, one at a time). Is there a way of using any of our software or tables to bring up a list of DAs for just Wallaceburg?

The other thing I’m a bit puzzled about is when I bring up the entry for Wallaceburg locality on GeoSuite, under Geographic levels on the printout I have: DA /AD: 35360278, and CT / SR: 5569935.00. Why is it giving a CT code when the Chatham-Kent CA (556) isn’t tracted? And why just one DA code, when there are a number on the Wallaceburg map? Does GeoSuite just give one central DA to represent the whole locality?

Any help would be greatly appreciated! - I’m meeting the prof 9:00 am tomorrow morning.

Answer

1) The 9935 suffix stands for “Untracted, Ontario”, if I recall properly. This fits nicely with the “556” prefix, which indicates “Chatham-Kent CMA”.

If you are using ArcGIS, you could overlay a boundary map of Wallaceburg onto a map of dissemination areas, and cookie cut the Wallaceburg DAs out from the rest. You could download the Urban Area boundary map from the 2006 Census (http://janus.ssc.uwo.ca/html/2006_census_geographic_files.html#eng), and overlay it on the DA map of Ontario found on the same page. The advantage of this would be that if the prof wanted to do any mapping, the needed layer would have already been created (and could be used to match to census data).

2)I forwarded your question to a consultant in Geography Division and received the following answer:

"This is one of the bugs with the UA table in GeoSuite, however there is a work around. If you select Chatham-Kent in Step 1 of 4, and select DB (Dissemination Block) in Step 2 of 4, you will then have the ability to choose from any higher level geography in the following step. In Step 3 of 4, select UA from the drop down menu and bring across the attributes of interest (UARAuid, UARAname, UARAtype, UARApop2006), then go back to the drop down and select DA from the drop down and bring across the rest of the attributes for your table (DAuid, DApop2006), select no duplicates. Then, set a condition where UARAuid = 350999, click okay, then next to run the query. You should then end up with a table containing 23 DA records for the UA of Wallaceburg (attached).

5569935.00 is a default CT code for non CT areas (556 = CMAuid, 99 = not applicable, 35 = PRuid)."

I believe this answers all your questions. Please let me know if anything is still unclear.