30 posts tagged with "30DaysOfMaps"

We made it! It's the 30th so the final day of this year's #30DayMapChallenge. The theme for this final map is "The final map" - The final challenge—your choice! Revisit a technique from earlier in the month, refine an idea, or try something completely new. End the challenge on a high note with a map that showcases your creativity, growth, or just pure fun!

So today's report isn't pretty, it's not a great map, but it is useful! It's actually one of our test reports. Over the previous releases of Icon Map Pro, we've been providing some great capabilities for drawing items on the map, that either come out of the Power BI dataset, or are linked to it. These include:

• Circles
• Lines
• Images
• H3 hexagons, from coordinates, or cell IDs
• Heatmap
• Well Known Text or GeoJSON from the dataset
• GeoJSON, TopoJSON, Esri shapefiles, KML files linked to data
• ArcGIS features layers linked to data (and formattable)
• Vector tile layers linked to data

For our next release, which should land within the next 2 weeks, we've done a chunk of work to ensure these work together on the map at the same time. This is no easy task as ideally we would have a different, disconnected set of fields for each layer in the map, but Power BI infrastructure doesn't provide this capability. We work around this by determining the type of object to draw based on the which data is provided in each row. For example if you provide a longitude, latitude and a image URL, then we know that row relates to an image, where as a longitude, latitude and a circle size value relates to a circle. It's not ideal, but with some careful data modelling, it's possible to achieve a map with everything combined. You can determine the order the layers appear by setting the 'z-index'.

Hence the report below, this is one of the reports we use to test that this field mapping is working correctly. This report includes a GeoJSON file formatted using Power BI conditional formatting as a choropleth, circles with three configurations of formatting, a couple of WKT linestrings, some images with text labels, H3 cells, a heatmap and a couple of curved lines, one with a circle at the destination. And this only represents a fraction of the different combinations possible!

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

The penultimate day - it's day 29 of the #30DayMapChallenge and today's topic is "Overture" - Use data from the Overture Maps Foundation. Explore data from Overture Maps Foundation to create a map that highlights new geographic datasets. A great opportunity to dive into open geospatial data!

For those not familiar with it, Overture Maps is a collaborative, open-source project aimed at creating high-quality, up-to-date map data that's freely available for anyone to use. One of the key aspects of Overture Maps is its use of web-native technologies like PMTiles. PMTiles is a file format designed to efficiently store and deliver map tiles over the web. This means maps can load faster and perform better directly in the browser, even without heavy server infrastructure behind them.

We're still building our PM Tiles integration into Icon Map Pro, but progress is well underway. Here's an example showing Overture Maps building outlines loaded from PM Tiles. The key thing, is that the tiles are a single 135gb file stored in cloud blob storage.

In this report, we're showing the building outlines, extruded based on the buildings' height. Where available, we're colouring the buildings based on their type. Power BI tooltips are used to expose the building's name and type.

Buildings data from Overture Maps is released under the ODbL license.

© OpenStreetMap contributors. Available under the Open Database License. Data from Microsoft Esri Community Maps contributors. Available under CC BY 4.0. Google Open Buildings. Available under CC BY 4.0. USGS 3D Elevation Program Digital Elevation Program.

Nearly there - it's day 28 of the #30DayMapChallenge and today's topic is "The blue planet" - Map oceans, rivers, and lakes. Focus on water today. Map the oceans, rivers, or lakes, diving deep into marine environments or water systems.

For this report, I've used fishing catch statistics from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and am showing catch, landings and fish stock numbers within the fishing areas for the different species of fish. I'm using the "Oceans" base map from Esri to overlay a choropleth map that updates according to the criteria selected.

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

And we're up to day 27 of the #30DayMapChallenge and today's topic is "Micromapping" - Map something small and precise. Zoom in and map a small area in high detail. It could be a single building, a street corner, or a tiny plot of land. Focus on accuracy at a small scale.

Today's challenge takes us to Manchester in the UK, and more specifically, inside the Trafford shopping centre. It's worth shouting out that all of the data is fictional - these are not the real sales, and may not be the correct outlets either. I've created the shape file from a photo of the store plan! However the scenario is very real. This report gives us a view of the sales, size and sales per m2 of each of the outlets. With the right data, we could even create an equivalent report showing the plan within each store too, as we've increased the maximum zoom level to 24.

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

Day 26 of the #30DayMapChallenge brings us to the theme of "Map Projections" - Explore different map projections and how they distort the world. Whether it's focusing on the classic Mercator, the Peters projection, or a more obscure one like the Waterman Butterfly, today is about playing with how we represent the round Earth on flat surfaces.

Icon Map Pro currently only supports the Web Mercator projection, however I recently discovered the Dirty Reprojectors tool that takes a shape file and reprojects it to another reprojection, but using fake longitude and latitude coordinates. So I've used this tool to reproject a map of the US states and counties and show them using the US Albers projection within Icon Map Pro.

This map has 2 levels of drill-down. At the top level it shows states, and you can then use the icons in the top right to turn on drill down mode, and drill into county level. A Power BI report page tooltip shows the result for that specific area.

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

Data from https://github.com/tonmcg/US_County_Level_Election_Results_08-24

Moving onto the last week of the #30DayMapChallenge and it's day 25. Today's theme is Heat - Map something related to heat. Focus on heat, whether it’s actual temperature or areas of intensity—like heatmaps of activity or metaphorical heat.

For this one I've decided to use the report I created on day 12, and switch it to a heat map - showing crime across the UK. It uses the longitude and latitudes of all the crimes to display the heatmap - this is were being able to load in more than 30,000 rows of data is essential.

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

Contains public sector information from data.police.uk licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0 Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2024

Day 24 of the #30DayMapChallenge and today's theme is "Only Circular Shapes" - Map using only circles. Everything should be circular. Forget straight lines and sharp edges, and see how creative you can get by sticking to round shapes.

Today seemed liked a good opportunity to explain the three different options we have in Icon Map Pro for determining circle size.

In the top of the Circle Configuration settings, you'll find a setting called Size Behaviour. This has three options:

1. Relative
   This option provides two further settings, minimum size & maximum size. This will plot all of your circles on the map with their size in pixels between these two values. The size will be determined based on the value in the "Circle Size" field. The smallest value is mapped to the "minimum size" and the largest to the "maximum size", with all other values being calculated in between.
2. Size in Pixels
   Similar to the option above, this option draws circles based on a size in pixels, but rather than being based on a range of values, it uses the specific value supplied in the "Circle Size" field. Therefore if you provide the value 50, it will draw a circle with a radius of 50. As the circle is drawn as pixels, when you zoom in or out of the map, the circle will always stay that size on the screen. This means when you zoom out, it covers more landmass.
3. Size in Meters
   Rather than drawing a circle in pixels, this option uses the value in the "Circle Size" field to draw the circle radius in meters. This means that when you zoom in on the map, the circle appears to get bigger on the screen, but covers the same amount of land. This is a useful option if you wanted to show all points within 5km of a store.

As we enter the weekend it 's day 23 of the #30DayMapChallenge and today's theme is 2 colours - Map based on memory. Create a map of a place you remember—hometown, favorite destination, or somewhere meaningful. It doesn’t need to be perfectly accurate, just how you recall it.

Unfortunately I just don't have time today to create a new map from scratch, so instead I thought I'd use our custom raster overlay and background map capability to show some historic maps. This map, hosted by MapTiler, is over 130 years old - I loved that I was able to find my house.

It's already 22 of the #30DayMapChallenge and today's theme is 2 colours - Create a map using only 2 colors. No gradients or shading—just two flat colors. This restriction encourages creativity in design and forces you to think about how to clearly convey your message with minimal color.

For this challenge I've extracted from OpenStreetMap, the areas identified as being used for military purposes in the UK. I've loaded this data into the Power BI dataset as well-known text (WKT). I've then used the formatting options in Icon Map Pro to set the colours to red. I've chosen our "Toner" background style to limit the background to black and white, making the red military areas stand out.

To distinguish between the different types of area I've used Icon Map Pro's ability to used hatching as well as solid fill colours, so I've formatted training areas and airfields with 2 different types of hatching - one at 45° with thick lines and one at 90° with thin lines. I've also set the outline of the barracks to use a dash pattern, rather than a solid line. I've created small images of each of these options, and added them to Power BI's new Tile Slicer to create an interactive legend that you can use to filter the objects on the map. I've added a region dropdown, and a couple of bar charts to represent the amount of area used by the military both by local authority and category.

I particularly like the ability to be able to do this for scenarios where accessibility is important, and colours can't be relied on to distinguish between areas.

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

Source for Local Authority to Region Lookup: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0 Source for Local Authority Boundaries: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2024

On to day 21 of the #30DayMapChallenge and today's theme is Conflict - Map a conflict. Political, territorial, or social—there are conflicts all around us. Map boundaries, tension points, or the outcomes of conflicts.

Just a really quick one today as I've not much time. This map shows the location of the UK's wartime pillboxes used for defence in the 1st and 2nd world wars. The last update to Icon Map Pro enabled large numbers of images to be added to the map using WebGL rendering. This report shows over thirteen thousand images on the map at the same time. Clicking the button in the top right enables a preview of our forthcoming upgrade to clustering which enables the clustering of images, as well as circles shown in day 1 of the challenge. Notice the option to use a square for clustering, rather than the circle used in day 1's postbox example.

Data courtesy of the Steve Thompson & the Pillbox Study Group

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