Filtering mapped data by location

When visualising location related statistics on thematic maps – be it the median age of residents, their incomes or expenditure, house price values, or any other statistical information - one of the biggest challenges is how to limit what is displayed on that map to only a specific region of interest, such as a sales territory or similar user-defined geographic area. The updated Thematic Mapper functionality will make such a task a breeze.

This blog post is just another teaser for the upcoming release of the Thematic Mapper app and its purpose is to show off some of the advanced and truly unique in-map analytics functionality that will soon be delivered into the hands of MapDeck users.
 
Take this very common scenario which demonstrates Thematic Mapper’s distinctive capability: a user/researcher has statistical data covering a whole country but what is needed is only a summary report that profiles a specific geographic region. This area could be an individual sales or franchise territory, an economic region, local government area, or even a single postcode or suburb.

Filtering data on online maps in real-time by location of interest is not an easy task because of the limitations of current online map publishing technologies which require data and map styles to be pre-configured in advance by a publisher. This process cannot be left to individual users.

So, the traditional approach is to cut data into specified geographic areas as the first step in the publishing process and then to use only each subset of data for analysis and for display on the maps.

This is a very time consuming and inefficient process, especially if you have to analyse and publish a few dozens or more area profiles. Not to mention that the process has to be repeated for each user that requires a different set of custom areas (such as sales or franchise territories that each business defines differently). This is the reason why to date  the access to customised spatial information has been so difficult and expensive. 

What the user really needs is the ability to easily “hide” the boundaries outside of the area of interest (that is, mask those with irrelevant data) and to limit the statistical calculations to only a selected subset of data.

Thematic Mapper does this all effortlessly and on-the-fly. Like in the following example, where postal areas have been clipped to a custom geographic region, defined as “Greater Sydney”, and then joined with postal area data from the ABS’ Basic Community Profile 2011 and from the Household Expenditure Survey 2009.

In-map analytics with MapDeck's Thematic Mapper

The resulting map highlights where the largest sub-markets within the Greater Sydney region are and what the total estimated size of that entire regional market is, in dollar terms per annum.

This is yet another example of the power of Thematic Mapper, a truly personalised in-map analytics solution. Sign up to MapDeck.com for a free test run of Thematic Mapper when it is released.