Infinitely many thanks for your answers!
In a few words, I have a dataset of digitized maps with country-borders by century, from 900 to 1900. My goal is to create a measure for each region of "how much the borders change historically".
Thus, I believed that the Raster tool would be a good strategy to this problem. More precisely, I did follow the steps below:
- converting all my digitized polygon maps with country-borders to polyline
- delete the coast-borders, not useful in the analysis
- rasterizing then the polyline dataset, with Polyline to Raster tool using the Object Field for classification.
I thought that I would obtain an attribute table with all the cells (I have chosen a relatively small cell size of 1000 to be able to capture the lines features) coded as follows: either 0 or null when no line crosses and the ID of the line when a line does cross the cell in question.
- However, as described above, I instead did get a Raster's attribute table composed only of cells coded positively. i.e. to my knowledge, those crossed by a line.
- Thus, I tried to rectify this by using the command Con(IsNull(raster), 0, 1) but this time I got only two values in my Attribute Table: 0 and 1.
- Moreover, I tried another strategy which is using the Reclassify tool in Gis. I first checked that the Old and New values were identical, set equal. Then, I set the New Value of No Data to be 0. This time, I got my original (only positively coded) attribute table with only one more 0 cell.
This is not satisfying because at the end of the day I would like to get for each rasterized-century-map an attribute table with the entire and identical cells, whose code depends on whether in the century a line crossed the cell or not. Lastly, after having set to 0 the null size and 1 the cells greater than 0, I would like to sum all the rasters, to get a certain measure of the stability of the cells (i.e. the number should be high if the cell was stable and always crossed by a line). Before using Zonal Statistics to get an average measure per region.
I hope that this was legible and would be happy to answer to your questions in order to be able to move forward on this problem, as I need it.
Infinitely many thanks again for your help!!