23 posts tagged with "30DaysOfMaps"

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.