I'm trying to set up a choropleth map for US counties, either as a layer on a map service (for example, using leaflet) or as a plain SVG/VML figure.
The thing is: whereas Chrome or Firefox render either option perfectly, IE8 does not handle so many polygons, and its loading times are unacceptable.
Before falling back to generating static PNGs server side, do you know any lightweight component (not Flash-based) that can generate such a visualization in IE8? Thank you!
In increasing order of complexity :
Creating a choropleth map can be done very easily with Tableau. The visualization can be exported and made interactive. Tableau is not a free software, but you will have a trial period to try it.
We also had students implementing their choropleth map using D3 with the map imported using JSON. As far as I know, this didn't pose problems with IE, although I didn't specifically test them on IE.
Finally, the winning team in one of our course contest created a map (although not a choropleth, they still visualized data on it) using Processing. This usually involves more coding (Java-like), but doable and you can test their visualization on an IE8 browser (at this link - the visualization is very slow to load but this is more due to their extraction of tweeter feeds rather than the map itself).
In general, you can see our students' visualization at this URL, several of them having map visualizations - and you can browse technologies used for choropleth maps at the visualizing.org website.
Related
I have a point feature class that is survey monuments. I'd like to create a page for each survey monument that would have a a overview map showing where the monument is and a report on the attributes. Ideally I'd like to be able to insert photos that are attached to the feature.
I'm trying to determine what software would be best to do this, and any tricks I need to know. I have access to the following software:
ArcMap
ArcGIS Pro
FME
Geocortex
It seems like this should be a common type of thing to want to do, but I can't seem to figure out how to do it in any software other than using the Geocortex reporting tool. However, these aren't currently in our Geocortex site and it is quite cumbersome to get everything to a point where I can create reports there.
I figured this out. Not sure why I missed it initially. In ArcGIS Pro they are called Map Series and in ArcMap they are data driven maps.
Searching on those will give tonnes of information on how to do them.
Is there a lib outside of mapbox gl for loading the tiles of a giving bbox and zoom level?
i've created some tilesets and styles in Mapbox and want to load it in other viewers (cesium, google maps,...)
I only have min, max lonlat and a z-level and need
to load the specific tiles at the abstraction for the z-level
iterate over the features
get the geometry of the features in wgs84
#csdev. Thanks.
Yes i know there are other implementations in other viewers (ol3, leflet). But i'm not searching for a viewer, only for a framework which service the logic for loading and unloading vector tiles by given bboxes. Because i need it especially for cesium.
I see that there is a possibility to combine ol3 and cesium (ol3-cesium). But i think i will lose at this point functionality of cesium.
mapbox-gl-js is the native library for interacting with mapbox vector tiles - the linked docs show it is build on web-gl, like cesium.
Regarding other libraries:
Leaflet has plugins for showing your mapbox vector tiles - some listed on the site only work on older versions of Leaflet, some only newer.
Similarly, OpenLayers added support for vector tiles, and different examples out there work only with different versions of OpenLayers - their official site has two examples that work with the current version 3.20.
Esri is rolling out their vector tile implementation right now, and there are posts in esri forums from last year explaining specifically about how to utilize mapbox vector tiles using their javascript api.
All of those libraries let you do what you are asking - load the mapbox vector tiles, process features and attributes, and work in different projections.
Edit: (can't post comments yet) - OK, your question says (cesium, google maps,...) so I wasn't sure what was implied by the ellipses. I will add that at least one of the leaflet plugins, and some of the solutions I have seen out there in adapting vector tiles for openlayers or leaflet utilize the mapbox-gl-js library to load and parse vector tiles, then adapt the data for the viewer in question. Obviously if you write a custom solution for cesium an approach like that is possible, and that both libraries are web-gl based is a positive thing. However, I have not done it myself so no more to add. I'm sure you googled 'mapbox cesium' so found things like the recent google post about incorporating MB tiles to cesium, and some built-in cesium classes related to mapbox. All good places to start.
Edit Lastly, I'll say that you might want to be looking at the various libraries that are part of the mapbox vector tile ecosystem - so this library, for example, might be as close as you will get to what you want at present without requiring you to go down to the web-gl level for a custom solution: mapbox vector-tile-js
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i'm trying to desing a new application which allow user see he/her current location on a custom map (office, university compus, etc). but actually i have a couple of question in my mind (i haven't designed this kind of application before). i'm wondering:
How can i draw my own maps, what is the best option for it? there any format that i have to care of, there are any specification about it ?
Once i have my custom map. how can i do to mapping a global position system with the local positions ?
What are the tricks behing zoom on maps ? just differents layers with more or less informations and those layers changes on users demand ?
If a whant to mark some specific points over the map, like a cafeteria, boss's office etc, how can i do that ?
Sorry if my questions are too much generics and dumb, but i really need some clues about this topic because i don't have any idea how to design this kind of application as best as possible. and we don't whant to reinvent the wheel.
I will appreciate any help that you can provide me in order to desing this application
There are a number of approaches you can take to creating a maps application. Which one you use depends on the set of features you want to support, and the degree of control you want to maintain over the product.
If you want something like an embedded google map, then clearly the JavaScript Google Maps API may be best solution. If you need to support further features from the server side, like directions, you can make use of the web services api:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/webservices/index.html
If, on the other hand, you essentially need a zoomable map of an area that you can define with markers and borders drawn from your database, and you want complete custom control over this image without having to rely on Google Maps' data or branding, then you can fairly easily build a scalable image either on the client or server, or both.
To start, you will need a set of point coordinates from which to draw your map. These can be derived from the SVG generated by a program like Adobe Illustrator when you draw vector graphics. Thus you could draw your own map in Illustrator and use the generated svg to create your map. In this case you will have to read about SVG and understand how to use it. Raphael.js is an excellent library that offers cross-browser compatible handling of SVG. If your map is of a familiar region, such as a country, you may be able to find SVG coordinates for it already on the web. You could start by grabbing a subset of the data in this file on wikipedia for the country or region you want to map.
Once you have a set of coordinates that define your map areas, you can keep them in a config file that can be read into memory from disk by your application as needed. It's convenient to save this data in the form of a hash, where each set of key-value pairs stores a separate svg 'path', or set of point coordinates that forms a closed shape. These could represent, for instance, the counties in a state.
Once you have the appropriate 'paths' stored in this manner, it is relatively easy to write a wide variety of software implementations.
Check out the imagemagick convert
documentation for the -draw
option for an example of how to
draw a png, jpeg, or gif on your
server from your stored svg paths.
Adam Hooper has some brilliant ideas of what to do with a custom map using SVG on the client side:
http://adamhooper.com/eng/articles/9
Note that you do not necessarily
need to use SVG. Here's an
example of a map drawn on the
server using ImageMagick, with a
highlightable clickmap drawn over it
by the browser, where the
highlighting is handled by the
jquery maphighlight plugin, which
uses the canvas element where it is
supported and VML in its place on
Internet Explorer browsers. All of
these layers (ImageMagick,
client-side click-map, and
client-side javascript highlighting)
are built with straight lines drawn
between point coordinates, so none
of this is actually SVG, and may be
easier to understand. Have a look
at the page source to see how the
click map is drawn, then look at the
maphighlight plugin to understand
what's going on:
http://davidlynch.org/js/maphilight/docs/
A third option, if you need to support more google-maps-like features, but want to add your own map data without using an overlay, is to implement some application of Open Street Maps. If you go to openstreetmap.org, find the area you want to customize, and click the edit tab at the top, you can edit the map as needed for your area. This edits the map data for all users of the Open Street Map service. Then you can get the openlayers javascript from http://openlayers.org/ to render a map on your website from Open Street Maps data that you can freely edit yourself. Also see the OpenStreetMap Wiki that tells you more about the OpenStreetMap movement.
If you don't want to reinvent the wheel, then don't try do do it: take the Google Maps API, add some markers and you're done. Zooming included. They have examples to guide you and there's loads of knowledge about the usage.
All you need is a free API key.
Edit: Your comment in the original question indicates that you want to use a custom overlay over existing maps. That's also possible as this example shows (see docs for custom overlays).
In the effort to not reinvent the wheel (which is definitely a good idea), much of the work of the maps themselves has already been done. The simplest approach will be to integrate Google Maps into your application. To address your individual points:
You don't have to draw your own maps. Tons of them already exist. Unless you're asking about drawing maps of indoor facilities yourself and plotting on those? In which case, how do you plan to approach this from a hardware perspective? GPS won't work well.
You need a piece of hardware that supplies the GPS coordinates. From there, you can just call the API to plot it.
Already done.
Calls to the API. Just provide the location (address, GPS, whatever you have) to the API. GPS will be more accurate, of course. But I'm pretty sure there's a geolocation service as part of the API and you can store the coordinates locally and adjust them manually if they're inaccurate.
If I'm off-base from your actual idea here, let me know. "Maps" is, of course, vague.
Does anyone know of software or flex/flash/as3 source or visualisation software that could be used to make interactive graphs, where the user would enter a query that would pull data from a MySQL database and the user would build a sunburst or icicle graph by dragging and dropping items into a tree-like structure and they would be able to view the graph? i have attempted to use flare but my programming skills are pretty bad. So far from what i gather, flare only allows the graphing of defined datasets rather than allowing a user to modify the dataset and thus creating a new dataset.
Help?
This is far too big for the scope of a single question. You're going to need to write at least a few different pieces.
1.) Access to the database and a way to view datasets
2.) Control handlers to drag and drop datasets onto your chart object
3.) A chart object that can handle receiving dropped dataset items and render itself accordingly.
There are lots of good charting frameworks out there including Flare, Axiis, Flex charting, Fusion Charts, iLog Elixir. I'm not sure what you're trying to do but any one of those should be able to serve as your charting piece.
We worked on a project that used Flare and Flex. We had to provide the data to Flare in an XML format called GraphML, so we had code to convert the data into the required format in our C# backend, and then we passed it to Flex. There were naff all tutorials for it though, so took some time to figure it out.
There is a properly cool graphing tool (although its commercial) called Kapit. Check out their Diagrammer and Visualizer demos. It could be the case that its worth the spend.
But I agree with Mr Owen, theres some mad scope in that question:)
I've got a request to implement a visualization service for geographical related data.
I have a list of Italian ZIP Codes (they are called CAP in Italian). I've already found a table which maps these ZIP codes to geographical coordinates (lat/long).
So, the data I have to visualize as map is structured the following way:
ZIPcode Latitude Longitude RequestCount
------- -------- --------- ------------
Is there an easy way (using a web service or implementing it myself using a component - preferably in .NET) for creating a map chart similar to the image i inserted below? It needn't to be that pretty and not necessarily geo-political.
I just need a indicator for every point which shows a smaller or bigger circle and next to it the value of RequestCount. I think this could be done either using the coordinates or, if there is some service which maps the Italian ZIP codes, using the ZIP code.
Thank you in advance!
alt text http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/3814/carsalesuh6.png
GeoNames offers a data set and open source libraries for geo mapping
Take a look at .net Charting and Chart FX Maps (I've never used these before).
Maybe...
Use the Google Map API. You can't draw circle overlays, but you can draw polygons. Here's the API for drawing polygons. An 8-sided polygon already looks pretty circle like. You could experiment with more sides to see how that looks.
Here's the API reference for the Google GPolygon class:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/reference.html#GPolygon
I've used MapServer for many projects and it works well and is very flexible. Haven't tried the .NET bindings though:
http://www.paolocorti.net/2006/09/20/mapserver-tutorial-for-c-mapscript-asp-net/
I've used Fusion Maps for things like this. It is flash based with a javascript API. You can easily feed it either a static XML file to start, but I've also built various webservices to give it dynamic capabilities. There are many options to change the look and feel of the map as well.
take a look at Mapv - a library of geography visualization
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