The easiest way to create thematic maps by state, county, or zip code

21 January 2010

We’ve just launched new thematic mapping features in SpatialKey that let you create maps of your data by state, county, or zip code with a few simple mouse clicks. We think this is the easiest way to create thematic maps – ever. To show off these abilities I’ll show an example of creating a thematic map of unemployment rate by US county. The end result will look like this:

Find some data

Your data must have location details down to the level of granularity that you are trying to map. For instance, if you want to show a map of states, all the records in your data should at least have US state (your data can be more granular too, you can map address-level data by state if you want). In this example I’ll be mapping US unemployment rate. The data for unemployment is provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and can be found here. I took the latest stats by US county and extracted only the data for October 2009.

After just a little massaging in a spreadsheet program my data looked like this:

You can download the CSV file that I used if you’d like to try it out for yourself.

Upload to SpatialKey

Once you have your data ready, you can upload it to SpatialKey. If you don’t already have a SpatialKey account, you can sign up for the free 30-day trial to get access right away and start uploading. During the upload process you’ll be asked to identify the location columns in your data, like street address, zip code, etc. We’ll do our best to automatically identify these columns based on your data, but you might have to help us out.

Make your map

When you load your data onto a map you’ll be asked what kind of map you want to create. We’ll make a thematic shape map, and we’ll choose to map the data by US geography (this includes state, county, or zip code).

Then we choose what the map should display. In this example we want to show the unemployment rate, so I’ll pick average unemployment rate, which will start me off with  a map of the US states with the average unemployment rate for all the counties in each state.

Now our thematic map shows the average unemployment rate for all the counties aggregated by state.

I can switch between this state view of the data and counties by changing the options in the layer’s settings panel.

Now we have a map of all the counties in the US (including Puerto Rico) that shows the unemployment rate of each county.

Customize and Explore

You can easily customize the bin ranges if you want to tweak them, or you can control the colors used (all maps are the same, just with a different color scheme):

You can also use all the filtering options that SpatialKey offers to filter the data in your thematic maps. Here’s an example of filtering to only show counties where the total labor force is over 100,000.

And here’s another example to show only the counties where the unemployment rate is greater than 15%:

No Programming Required

To generate these maps you don’t have to write a single line of code. It’s as simple as uploading your data and stepping through a few guided steps. If you wanted to change the map to show the total labor force per county instead of the unemployment rate, it only takes 3 clicks. There are lots of ways to make these maps, like this great tutorial on FlowingData shows, but we think SpatialKey gives you the easiest way to create and analyze thematic maps.

Posted by Doug McCune in choropleth, examples, thematic with 2 comments

      

Building Permit Data from DataSF

11 November 2009

Another dataset that the city of San Francisco makes publicly available is the Department of Building Inspection’s monthly permit report. This report contains all the building permit activity within the city, from permits to add new condos to inspections of sprinkler systems. We took one full year of data, from September 2008 to August 2009, and brought it into SpatialKey. During the selected year-long time period there were over 25,000 permits issued. We can see the breakdown by the type of building on the right. Residential housing takes the top three spots (divided into Apartments, and one and two family homes).

We mapped the concentration of where these permits were issued. The different types of buildings, such as apartments versus office buildings, have very different distributions throughout the city. Some of these distributions are expected, such as the high concentration of permits for offices in the downtown area of San Francsico. But some of the distributions are more interesting and tell a story about the urban makeup of the city. Notice that apartments are much more concentrated closer to downtown in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, Nob Hill, and Hayes Valley, most heavily around the eastern and northern areas surrounding the financial district. Two-family homes (ie duplexes) have a different concentration that includes neighborhoods like Cow Hollow and the Mission. And one-family homes are in neighborhoods like Pacific Heights, Noe Valley, and Twin Peaks.

The maps here show the number of building permits by the type of building.

Here are some alternate screenshots that are at a more granular resolution, so you can see a bit more detail on the different areas of the city. Click each thumbnail for a much larger version:

Try it for yourself

You can open up the sample report that we created to visualize these building permits.  The report will load with two layers: the building permits and the neighborhood boundaries of San Francisco. You can change which types of building permits are shown by selecting items in the “Proposed Use” filter pod that is open in the report.

• Try Sample Report

Looking for easy-to-use location intelligence from your own data?  Get started with our free trial, and start visualizing your data in minutes without installing any software.

Notes on the data

It’s always important to remember what data we’re looking at. This is the number of building permits issued between September 2008 and August 2009. A single building might have multiple permits issued, which could be everything from renovations or re-roofing to a change from residential to commercial, etc.

This is the third part of an ongoing exploration of publicly accessible San Francisco data from DataSF.org. Please see the other posts in the series.

The images and reports in this post were created with publicly accessible data. We have no association with the city of San Francisco (but we’d love to, so contact us if you’re from the San Francisco government and want to use SpatialKey).

Posted by Doug McCune in DataSF, San Francisco, examples with no comments

      

Where are the Loud Neighbors? Late Night Noise in Sacramento, CA

2 November 2009

The Sacramento Police Department makes their dispatch database publicly available via monthly text files.  These files are exported from Sacramento’s Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system, which supports police dispatch and response functions in their 911 center.  These files include information about each dispatch, including details like date and time, type of call – from homicides to traffic stops – and location.

It took just a couple of minutes to import one of these files into SpatialKey, where we can produce rich interactive maps and reports related to dispatch activity in Sacramento.  The file from August 2009 contained about 30,600 records with location information.  Dispatches for Disturbance-Noise were the 7th most common type of dispatch in August.

By using the Temporal Heat Index and Timeline to inspect the date and time of occurrence, we get a better picture of when Disturbance-Noise calls occurred.  The Temporal Heat Index summarizes the number of crimes by hour of day and day of week.  Notice the dispatch volume is generally highest late at night – especially on Saturday and Sunday.

So where are these early morning disturbances?  Simply select day/hour grids of interest and zoom in to see the detail.  Here’s a look at noise disturbances southeast of Capitol Park between 1 and 3am on weekends in August:

Try it for yourself

You can open up the sample report that we created to visualize these dispatches.  The report is fully interactive, so you can really explore the dispatch activity in Sacramento.  We saved the report with a filter for Disturbance-Noise. Try modifying this filter – and adding others – to see how SpatialKey works.  Interested in seeing where and when the 338 Drunk Suspects were encountered?  Or the 27 Shooting into Inhabited Dwellings?  Maybe you want to see where and when the 2246 Subject Stops occurred.  It’s simple with SpatialKey.

• Try Sample Report

Looking for easy-to-use location intelligence from your own data?  Get started with our free trial, and start visualizing your data in minutes without installing any software.

Notes

The images and reports in this post were created with publicly accessible data.  Check out Sacramento’s dispatch page to see their notes about what data is included.  We omitted data without address location in our SpatialKey report.

We have no association with the Sacramento police department (but we’d love to, so contact us if you’re from the Sacramento PD and want to use SpatialKey). SpatialKey does have specific features designed for Law Enforcement.

Posted by Tom Link in Computer Aided Dispatch, Law Enforcement, Sacramento, data import, examples, mapping, solutions, visualization with no comments

      

New Basemap Styles

29 October 2009

We partner with MapQuest for our basemaps.  Today, they announced new map styles and imagery improvements, and we like ‘em!  The cleaner styles help the symbolizations of user data stand out.

Posted by Tom Link in mapping, visualization with no comments