We're onto day 8 of the #30DayMapChallenge.

The theme for today's map is Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) - *Use data from HDX to map humanitarian topics. Explore the datasets from the Humanitarian Data Exchange, covering disaster response, health, population, and development. Map for social good. *

The dataset caught my eye as it's vast! I'm using the Global Population Density for 400m H3 Hexagons dataset from Kontur. I then limited to the Central American countries which is still 286,422 rows of data. As we've seen from previous challenges, more than 30,000 rows is a challenge for Power BI. I've used a forthcoming version of Icon Map Pro that will enable more H3 hexagons to be displayed on the map - in this case nearly 300,000.

The earlier challenge where I used H3 hexagons, Icon Map Pro generated the H3 cells based on aggregating longitude and latitude coordinates, whereas in this case, the data is provided as 2 columns - H3 Cell Index and Population in that cell. Icon Map Pro natively supports these cell IDs so the map configuration is really easy and only requires these 2 fields. I also overlaid a shape file with the country outlines in too, and added a Power BI slicer to zoom to specific countries.

If you'd like to see how the report was built, you can download it here.

Today is day 7 of the #30DayMapChallenge.

The theme for today's map is Vintage style - Map something modern in a vintage aesthetic. Create a map that captures the look and feel of historical cartography but focuses on a contemporary topic. Use muted colors, fonts, and classic elements.

There were a number of ways I considered tackling this challenge. The first was to head over to Mapbox Studio as Icon Map Pro supports Mapbox Studio styles. However, I thought it would be good to see what I could achieve without relying on third-party integrations. So instead I've achieved the vintage style by firstly placing an image of a canvas as the background for my Power BI report. I generated this using Chat GPT. I then added Icon Map Pro to the report and set the visual background to Off. This doesn't immediately have any effect, but in the background map options, you can change the transparency. So I chose our monochrome "Toner (no labels)" style and set its transparency to around 70 percent. That means that the normally white areas of the map show the map canvas, and the black water and infrastructure areas are shown in a dark brown. I feel this gives a nice vintage appearance.

Then on top of this I added a feature layer of listed buildings from Historic England's Open Data Hub. This is loaded directly from their servers using our ArcGIS integration and displayed in a transparent blue colour, so you still get some of the canvas effect. Then finally I applied tooltips - data sourced directly out of the ArcGIS layer to show the name of the building. I chose a serif style font, and set the transparency of the tooltip so the canvas shows through a little.

Finally I added the London Boroughs as a shape layer, so it's possible to zoom into a specific London Borough using a Power BI slicer - which again through transparency options on the shape layer is highlighted on the map.

If you'd like to see how the report was built, you can download it here.

Today is day 6 of the #30DayMapChallenge.

The theme for today's map is raster - A map using raster data. Rasters are everywhere, but today’s focus is purely on grids and pixels—satellite imagery, heatmaps, or any continuous surface data.

Whilst most data displayed on the map in Power BI is going to be point or vector data bound to the Power BI data model, it is often useful to add additional reference information in the form of raster data. Icon Map Pro supports a number of sources of raster data including XYZ tiles and WMS layers.

In this report we've overlaid data from the British Geological Survey (BGS) on top of the base map. The Power BI slicer in the top right corner allows you to select from a number of different layers detailing the makeup of the UK's bedrock. To add some additional information, we've overlaid a GeoJSON layer showing the locations of all the UK's quarries.

If you'd like to see how the report was built, you can download it here.

Today is day 5 of the #30DayMapChallenge.

The theme for today's map is a journey - Map any journey. Personal or not. Trace a journey—this could be a daily commute, a long-distance trip, or something from history. The key is to map movement from one place to another.

The data for today's map comes from aircraft flying above my house. I capture the transponder transmissions using a Raspberry PI with an antenna and push these into Microsoft Fabric's Realtime Intelligence workload. I've included a morning's worth of captured data from November 1st, and animated it using the Play Axis custom visual.

The data captured includes the longitude and latitude information for each aircraft - these are stored on a separate row in the dataset. I then use the CONCATENATEX function in DAX to generate a Well-Known Text (WKT) linestring. Using the aircraft's unique ID as the ID field in Icon Map Pro, and then the DAX measure, it create a WKT linestring for each aircraft. I'm showing the last 10 minutes worth of history for each aircraft - so you'll see planes not moving for a while after I stop detecting data for them. At the end of each linestring, I'm displaying an SVG image of an aircraft - different images for each category of plane. These images are rotated within Icon Map Pro to point in the direction of travel.

If you'd like to see how the report was built, you can download it here.

Today is day 4 of the #30DayMapChallenge.

The theme for today's map is hexagons - Maps using hexagonal grids. Step away from square grids and try mapping with hexagons. A fun way to show density or spatial patterns..

Given our logo, this challenge could have been made for us! Icon Map Pro has the in-built capability to index point data (longitudes and latitudes) into Uber's H3 hexagon grid system - as well as providing support for data already indexed. For this challenge we're going to use open data from data.police.uk and examine every crime committed in England in September 2024. It turns out there were over 435,000 crimes committed in England in September that had their location recorded. In fact there were nearly different 200,000 locations in the dataset.

This report is sending all 435,000 crimes into the map to be converted into hexagons - well beyond the data limits for the "out of the box" visuals. The report allows you to select the resolution for these hexagons using a Power BI slicer. Pick a higher number for smaller hexagons when zooming in an looking at a smaller area. The hexagon cells are coloured according to how many crimes were recorded within that area - from white being the lowest through blue to red being the highest (with more time available I'd have added a legend). Two Power BI bar charts allow you to filter the map by type of crime and region, and a slicer is provided to drill into specific Local Authorities. You can also click on a cell to see the breakdown of crimes within each cell.

If you'd like to see how the report was built, you can download it here.

Includes data from data.police.uk and ONS GeoPortal. All the data on this site is made available under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Any now we're moving along to day 3 of the #30DayMapChallenge.

The theme for today's map is polygons - A map with polygons. Regions, countries, lakes—this day is for defined shapes that fill space..

Whilst Icon Map Pro has a wide range of options for displaying polygons - the most popular and fastest way is to upload a file into the report, whether it's Esri Shapefile, KML, GeoJSON or TopoJSON. However, the downside of this, is that it increases the size of the report, and for really large files, this approach won't work. For example in today's challenge, I'm using the National Forest Inventory from the Forestry Commission's Open Data site. This dataset is downloadable as an Esri Shapefile, but it's nearly 2gb in size containing more than 650,000 polygons. For large and complex datasets such as these, we need a different approach. I've decided to use vector tiles, to break up the shape file into a grid in which each square is downloaded only when required. I'm hosting my tile layer in my GeoServer, although Mapbox would also have been another easy option.

The vector tiles are then matched to my Power BI dataset on the fly, and coloured using Power BI's conditional formatting. This also means that the shapes are interactive - I can add tooltips, select them to interact with other report elements - in my case a table.

I've also included a Local Authority slicer so you can view a the woodland within a specific Local Authority area. I've added a reference layer to show the Local Authority boundaries - this is filtered by conditional formatting in Icon Map Pro to just show the boundary for the Local Authority we've filtered to.

If you'd like to see how the report was built, you can download it here.

2nd of November brings us to the 2nd Day of the #30DayMapChallenge.

The theme for today's map is lines - A map with focus on lines. Roads, rivers, routes, or borders—this day is all about mapping connections and divisions. Another traditional way to keep things moving.

Icon Map Pro can do a lot with lines, whether simple lines between two points, or complex linestrings. However, for this challenge I thought I'd keep things simple, and use a dataset that's an old favourite of mine - airline flight routes from OpenFlights.org. The Power BI report allows you to select an airline, and optionally source or destination country, cities or airports, and draws all of the routes that that airline flies. As a little touch, I included nautical miles in the scale.

If you'd like to see how the report was built, you can download it here.

November 1st kicks off the 30-Day Map Challenge. Each day in November brings a new map visualisation challenge, and naturally, I'll be using Icon Map Pro in Power BI.

Throughout the month, I'll be showcasing the visual's capabilities, including both existing features and new ones we're about to release. We'd love for you to join in too—if you're interested, please get in touch at support@iconmappro.com, and we’ll send you a time-limited version of the visual for embedding on your blog—the same version I'll be using.

The theme for Day 1 is points - A map with points. Start the challenge with points. Show individual locations—anything from cities to trees or more abstract concepts. Simple, but a key part of the challenge.

Both built-in Power BI visuals can display circles or bubbles for point data, so I wanted to push the boundaries a bit and showcase something beyond what the standard visuals can do. Obviously I needed some point data, and I was keen to show something new that I haven't worked with before. I extracted the locations of every postbox in England from OpenStreetMap data. There are over 74,000 of them, which poses a challenge for Power BI, as its visuals are typically limited to 30,000 rows of data.

Icon Map Pro is capable of displaying up to 180,000 rows of data and we've been working hard on extending that in the latest releases, adding new performance improvements. In the forthcoming release it can comfortably display up to 360,000 circles (with labels and tooltips if required) and we hope to extend that further. Whilst we can now display all those points on the map at once, some might argue that it doesn't make sense to do so, which is why we're also working on improving our clustering. You still need to be able to include all the points, before you can cluster them - so even with clustering increasing the number of rows is essential.

So let me walk you through the map below.

Background map - this is our built in 'Positron' style, which is normally light grey. However, I've changed the colour of the water to white and land background to pale green using a forthcoming Icon Map Pro capability.

Overlay - I've overlaid the local authority boundaries (downloaded from geoportal.statistics.gov.uk).

Points - Using QGIS, I geocoded each postbox location with its respective local authority area, allowing the report to filter locations with a Power BI slicer. Each postbox is represented by a red circle on the map. A tooltip shows the operator, collection times, and postcode of each postbox where this information is available. I’ve added two versions of the map, switchable with bookmarks accessed via the “Cluster” button. One version shows all 74,000 circles at every zoom level; the other clusters the postboxes, displaying the number within each area.

If you'd like to see how the report was built, you can download it here.

I'm already looking forward to tomorrow's challenge - lines.

Meteomatics provide a weather API that can be used to overlay a wide range of weather layers onto your map as a WMS overlay.

To use Meteomatics, we need to use access token authentication.

Firstly, set the WMS Server URL as below: https://api.meteomatics.com/wms

Set the Authentication Type to “Token / API Key in URL” Set the Authentication Property Name to “access_token”

Then for the Authentication Property Value you need to get an access token from Meteomatics. Logging into this address will allow you to obtain a token: https://login.meteomatics.com/api/v1/token

Meteomatics uses WMS version 1.3.0 so we need to override Icon Map Pro to use this version:

Set Custom Parameter Name to “version” Set Custom Parameter Value to “1.3.0”

And finally enter the name of the metomatics layer into Layer. Eg “t_2m:C”

Esri are the market leader in GIS software and many of the companies we speak to have a large investment in ArcGIS with much of their geospatial data estate held within the platform.

Although Esri provide the ArcGIS visual for Power BI, its functionality is limited, making it challenging for organizations to integrate their geospatial assets effectively with other data within their data platform and Power BI.

We hope to change this with this week’s Icon Map Pro release in Microsoft AppSource. We’re releasing a huge range of ArcGIS features to help people surface their ArcGIS resources in Power BI.

Here are the headlines:

• Choose between username & password, API Key or OAuth2 authentication. By opting for OAuth2 with a client ID and secret in the ArcGIS Location Platform, you eliminate the need for individual user logins or ArcGIS Viewer licenses.
• Use ArcGIS background maps, or your organisation’s own custom maps.
• Bring in ArcGIS feature layers and use Power BI conditional formatting to set the colours – enabling for example choropleth maps using your Power BI data.
• Draw multiple reference layers and data-bound ArcGIS layers on the same map.
• Drill-down between levels to show more detailed geographies.
• Use Power BI native features such as Report Page Tooltips, Drill-Through, Cross-highlighting etc.
• Use ArcGIS to host your GeoJSON files to use in Icon Map Pro.
• Use ArcGIS vector tile layers.
• Use ArcGIS WMS layers and apply dynamic filters.
• Combine ArcGIS resources with other non-ArcGIS items.

And it’s not just ArcGIS features we’re releasing. Check out some of the other highlights:

• Ability to specify authentication for WMS layers.
• Improved process for uploading GeoJSON/KML/Shapefiles.
• New weight field and custom colours in heatmaps.
• Support for TopoJSON files alongside GeoJSON / KML and Esri Shapefiles.

This post just scratches the surface. Check out the Icon Map Pro documentation for the full details.

Oh and I can’t wait to share what’s coming next!