Thematic Mapper for easy in-map analytics

The updated Thematic Mapper app, recently released on MapDeck.com's platform, unlocks in-map analytic capabilities for organisations of any size or budget.

Traditionally, access to spatial information, and the tools required for analysing and visualising that information, was restricted to only companies with substantial budgets. The two choices for an organisation were to either deploy a suitable infrastructure in-house and employ expert analysts, or alternatively, source specialist advice from external consultants.

Both these options have one thing in common - cost. We are talking about tens of thousands, and very often hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual expenditure. It's no surprise that many organisations could not afford location intelligence at these prices.

The arrival of cloud-based online mapping tools is changing all that, democratising access to vital information for everybody, even the smallest companies, as well as individuals.

Early adopters of cloud-based mapping solutions are realising enormous benefits - both monetary and strategic.

In particular, instant and on-demand access to inexpensive analytical tools and information (on any device) allows individuals at all levels in an organisation to take advantage of location intelligence while making important business decisions. This leads to better outcomes. 

And since better outcomes accumulate over time, it allows an organisation to reach its goals faster, more effectively, and with minimal expense. The benefits of using cloud-based mapping and spatial analysis tools are too good to remain the best kept secret for much longer.

With the release of the upgraded Thematic Mapper app MapDeck is taking the concept of in-map DIY spatial analytics to a whole new level.

Customised thematic map example

Thematic Mapper is an example of the new generation of online mapping tools which allow full personalisation of information content on maps. That is, unlike traditional online maps which require an administrator to configure for end users what data to display and how, Thematic Mapper gives each user full control over the entire map creation and map publishing/sharing process. It is a whole new approach to creating online maps.

Thematic Mapper users can now:

• filter national and regional data to show just a selection of areas of interest, such as a single sales or franchise territory, retail catchment area, or a local neighbourhood;
• combine public and private data, such as demographic statistics from Census surveys with company sales and customer data;
• carry out in-map analysis on data and visualise results on maps and in summary tables;
• customise presentation of information, from arrangement of preferred base maps and top overlays, to polygon styling according to personal preferences; and
• publish or share privately all created content and information.

For a limited time, all MapDeck users have the opportunity to try Thematic Mapper at no cost. The app is available on a one month free subscription until 20 December 2016.

Use this invite code to sign up: f10dc1f2

About MapDeck:
MapDeck is an online marketplace for spatial information and simple-to-use, task-oriented tools to support a variety of activities, be it business or investment related, environmental, community or policy focused.

By collecting the most useful spatial data in one place, and providing simple tools to interact with it, MapDeck makes it easy for anybody to take advantage of location intelligence technology and to derive invaluable, personalised information for decision making.

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.

Creating thematic maps with Sales Area Management Tool

As hinted in one of our earlier posts, Sales Area Management Tool (SAMT) can be used in many creative ways. In this article we demonstrate its use as a simple thematic mapper app.

Firstly, a brief overview of what thematic maps are and what they are used for.

Very often it is desirable to review the information available on hand in a summary format, for example to highlight the main patterns or trends otherwise buried in the details. One simple technique when dealing with spatially distributed phenomena is thematic mapping (or, as it is technically known, choropleth mapping). Wikipedia provides a comprehensive definition:

A choropleth map (from Greek χώρο ("area/region") + πλήθος ("multitude") is a thematic map in which areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement of the statistical variable being displayed on the map, such as population density or per-capita income.

The choropleth map provides an easy way to visualize how a measurement varies across a geographic area or it shows the level of variability within a region.

To create thematic map you will need:

1. spatial data representing areas as polygons (e.g. postal areas or zip codes)
2. attribute information about those polygons (e.g. Census statistics)
3. mapping software to create a map (e.g. Sales Area Management Tool)

  
If you already have a summary dataset (e.g. information on family incomes from Census or similar source) which can be referenced to a specific boundary data (e.g. postal areas), it is only a matter of simple “copy and paste” to create thematic map with Sales Area Management Tool.

Example of thematic map created with Sales Area Management Tool 

In particular, you can create 4 different “territories”, each representing postcodes with attribute values belonging to a specific data range (e.g. quartiles of weekly family incomes). Just copy the list of postcodes for each data range from your spreadsheet to SAMT as comma separated values, then style the polygons in a given group, and it’s done! You have a thematic map that can be copied into your documents or printed for further perusals in a hardcopy format.

SAMT is a very handy tool for quick generation of thematic maps with public data like Census statistics, or with your own information derived from, for example, user surveys or sales statistics.

The above map is just an example to illustrate that even simple apps like SAMT can be used for a variety of tasks (i.e. can be "repurosed" in many creative ways). Low cost of such tools and ease of use means these apps offer a great value for money for the end user.


There are more advanced tools on MapDeck for creating thematic maps dynamically from large datasets.  We will describe them in detail in future posts.


Contact aus-emaps.com on info@aus-emaps.com to arrange a free trial of SAMT.

Related Posts:
Sales Area Management Tool 2015 Upgrade
Sales Area Management Tool makes tedious tasks easy - and fast!
Mapping territories for multi-category franchise 
15 complex tasks Sales Area Management Tool will make easy 

Sales Area Management Tool makes tedious tasks easy - and fast!

Marking franchise territories, sales areas or delivery zones can be quite a challenge if you are not using advanced GIS software.

This is especially the case if you have to factor in the distance (for example, from a local office or retail premises or your warehouse), or account for some local market characteristics (like potential market size), in order to balance workloads of your staff, or optimise for available resources or profit potential.

Sales Area Management Tool (SAMT) is a simple, inexpensive online mapping application, but packed with features that will make the job very easy. And fast! So you can focus on chasing business opportunities and not on tedious tasks of collecting hardcopy maps, then hand drawing territories and compiling information into spreadsheets, which could take weeks...

The following use cases highlight several advanced features of SAMT and demonstrate the power of this application as a business tool, indispensable for making informed decisions, with minimum effort. 

Use Case 1: Generating franchise territories with predefined number of prospects
A very convenient feature of SAMT is that it enables linking polygons with attribute information about those polygons. For example, with data from Census, like the number of persons or dwellings per postal area or zip code. Totals for individual territories are calculated automatically as polygons are selected so, it is easy to experiment with different compositions of polygons per territory.

Example of balanced territories defined with Sales Area Management Tool (variable: total population)

If you have good understanding of your target market and are able to define minimum size to sustain individual franchisees, you will be able to mark territories with high precision, optimising the total number available for sale. In other words, you will be able to maximise your profits.


Use Case 2: Defining sales areas of equal market size in key destinations
Another very convenient feature of SAMT is the ability to display a trace-over layer, in addition to the main geometry layer used for creation of sales territories.

For example, a dataset outlining extents of the largest cities could be displayed on the map as a trace-over layer to highlight locations to concentrate on. Polygons of suburbs overlapping with these reference locations could then be used to create a set of sales territories.

And if those polygons are attributed with market size information (e.g. population counts, as in the previous use case, or $ market size estimates based on Household Expenditure Survey data), it will be possible to create territories with equal potential.

Example of using trace-over layer when marking primary territories

Given current sales resources, organisations can maximise profit opportunities by focusing on the largest and the most accessible geographic markets. And having a fair estimate of the potential in each target area will help with setting reasonable expectations about anticipated revenue but also with managing workloads of sales staff and measuring their relative performance objectively.


Use Case 3: Marking delivery zones
“Select by circle” functionality of SAMT allows drawing on the map a circle with a defined radius form a predefined point. This functionality makes it easy to define delivery zones by selecting polygons within the specified distance from a location of interest. And since polygons selected and compiled into zones by smaller radius circles are not included in the circles with a bigger radius, it is a very easy to define secondary and subsequent delivery zones. 

A list of polygons included in the selection (i.e. defined delivery zones) can be downloaded in csv format and converted into look-up tables for sales staff to, for example, calculate appropriate delivery charges when filling orders from customers. 

Example of defining delivery zones from postcodes: 5km, 15km and 30km radius 

These three use cases demonstrate how simple, spatially enabled apps can help in day to day operations of business of any size. Why would anyone spend days, or sometimes weeks, and very often many thousands of dollars, trying to accomplish what can be done with SAMT in a matter of minutes?

Even very small, incremental improvements in efficiency of your operations, or a decision that allows better optimising profit opportunity, can make a huge difference over time - so you can reach your goals faster and shorten the path to success.

MapDeck is still in locked beta-test release phase but subscribers to stand-alone SAMT v1 app can take advantage of free access to MapDeck tools and data at no additional cost. Contact aus-emaps.com on info@aus-emaps.com for more information.


Related Posts:
Sales Area Management Tool 2015 Upgrade

Overview of MapDeck support for common map layer services

MapDeck mission is to personalise location intelligence services. That is, to deliver tailored solutions to meet specific requirements of a wide range of users - from private individuals and small business operators, to professionals and persons in corporate roles.

Flexibility in selection and ease of mixing map layers is a basic requirement for personalising map creation process. It is especially important for those users who are just starting to master the power of maps for decision making and who are not yet technically savvy to use advanced features of spatial software.

Unfortunately, the reality is that even a simple task, such as displaying several map layers from different web services, can turn into quite a challenge because of incompatibilities of variants of public web map services available on the Internet.

MapDeck’s Map Layers Manager handles that complexity of options, which makes it easy for anybody to work with almost any map layer, regardless of web service origin.

"[It] handles information published in Open Street Map (OSM), Tile Map Service (TMS), Web Map Tile Service (WMTS), Web Map Service (WMS) as well as ESRI image, map and tile service formats..."

Map Layers Manager tool handles information published in Open Street Map (OSM) tile format, but also those in Tile Map Service (TMS), Web Map Tile Service (WMTS), Web Map Service (WMS) as well as ESRI image, map and tile service formats. Also those variants requiring access key and/or published with custom parameters. That should cover 99% of map service formats available on the Internet.

MapDeck users have an option to subscribe to Map Layers Manager app which will give them the ability to create their own map layers from almost any web map service publicly available on the Internet. These custom map layers can then be used to create personalised maps and/or can be shared with other MapDeck users.

But perhaps of the most interest to all is that, thanks to Map Layers Manager, many public, as well as commercial, web services will be catalogued and pre-configured for immediate use with MapDeck apps, making it very easy to discover and mash map layers, and ultimately to customise map content to individual requirements.

MapDeck.com public page

The first batch of 32 public map layers has already been published on MapDeck beta test version. Additional 220+ map layer services have already been preconfigured and they will be progressively released to MapDeck users.

Sales Area Management Tool 2015 upgrade

As MapDeck is getting readied for the official, albeit soft launch in December 2015 we would like to start introducing individual apps that will provide initial functionality of the platform.

Sales Area Management Tools (SAMT) is the first app we would like to bring to your attention. Initially developed as a stand-alone proof of concept, SAMT is now fully integrated with MapDeck platform. It means, output can now be saved in the cloud and can be shared with nominated individuals. And SAMT is now accessible on any screen size (i.e. desktop, tablets and on mobile phones).

Sales Area Management Tool: mobile screen view

SAMT functionality was significantly expanded. For example, users can now select any polygon structures to build their territories with, including postal areas/ zip codes, suburbs and other administrative boundaries available in MapDeck catalogue.

These boundaries can be joined with attribute information, like counts of persons or estimates of market value, so when polygons are joined into territories overall totals for individual territories are calculated automatically. It will help in creating balanced territories and with rebalancing territories as local market conditions change over time.

Sales Area Management Tool: territories with attributes (desktop view)

Map window now extends to a full screen and users have much more control over styling of individual territories. There is an option to change base map background to any map layer available in MapDeck catalogue. As well, users have the ability to display only one territory at a time (e.g. for printing purposes).

For ease of use, polygon names appear on-mouse-over and location search is now a standard functionality of SAMT. Sorting by name or id, and searching within long lists of territories, is also supported.

Sales Area Management Tool: filter by territory name and mouse-over functions (desktop view)

Users have the ability to create several versions of territories and saving them all in the same data table.

However, the most significant innovation added to SAMT is the ability to include a trace-over layer on the map. This functionality can be very handy for displaying older versions of territories in the background when creating an updated or alternative version. Or in case where territories have to be reconstructed from a different geography.

For example, territories created from postal areas could be easily recreated with suburbs when the former is used for reference as a trace-over layer.

Sales Area Management Tool: recreating postcode based territory (orange) with suburbs (purple)

The latest version of Sales Area Management Tool can be accessed right now by current users of version 1 of the app. Please contact MapDeck’s Australian affiliate aus-emaps.com via email on info@aus-emaps.com to arrange for login details.

Introducing Thematic Mapper

Thematic Mapper is an online tool that allows visualisation of information that can be matched to administrative boundaries, like postcodes or suburb, or to point locations like cities, towns or individual addresses.

[Thematic map depicting proportions of persons aged 5 to 14 per postcode - one of 7,942 available Census data layers]

Unlike traditional GIS tools, Thematic Mapper allows creating choropleth maps as well as displaying categorised point information on-the fly. In other words, polygons are assigned colours and points are assigned markers and colours dynamically, according to rules defined by the user and are not preconfigured in advance by the system administrator. This capability empowers users to create maps according to their individual requirements and aesthetics.

The key advantage of Thematic Mapper is ease of creation and publication of maps online. Users do not have to be experts in GIS and spatial analytics to make comprehensive, visually attractive and meaningful thematic maps. However, experienced analysts will also find Thematic Mapper very useful since it allows quick visualisation of a large number of analytical scenarios.

Thematic Mapper is provided as Software-as- a-Service. Hence, users do not need expensive infrastructure to deploy the software, nor do they need to employ technical staff to maintain it.

Key Features

Thematic Mapper has several distinguished features that are not offered by other online mapping tools, or even desktop applications. In particular:

1. Ability to preview the histogram of mapped data - which helps in determining data distribution characteristics and hence, in selecting the most appropriate method for categorisation of data (that is, whether data is normally distributed or not, and therefore, whether quantile, equal range or standard deviation methodology is the most appropriate to define data ranges for colouring).

2. Fully customisable colour schemas for polygons as well as markers, including multi- colour blending for the best visual effect (eg.  colour ranges can be generated based on 2, 3 or more interim colours, and not only based on the “start” and “end” colour; and each colour can be further adjusted manually, as required).

3. Ability to create complex markers - comprising variety of background shapes, sizes and colours, symbols (glyphs) and images, and any combination of these. Users can define two display modes for markers which will change at a predefined zoom level - plus there is the third highlight mode for mouse-over events.

[Example: custom markers and annotations for properties in Toorak, VIC]

4. Ability to create folders (decks) and saving specific map “views” for further reuse. Furthermore, decks can be public - to share with others, or private, for internal use only: example of public folder demonstrating Thematic Mapper in action. 



All in all, Thematic Mapper v1.0 allows fully customised visualisation and sharing of large volumes of spatially attributed information with just a few mouse clicks.

Please contact Australian distributor aus-emaps.com to arrange a free preview of Thematic Mapper in its full capability.


Special Offer

RoyMorgan’s Helix Personas Tool

Helix Personas is a consumer segmentation and data integration tool that combines psychographic and behavioural information to classify the Australian population into 56 Personas types and 7 Communities. This information aids in understanding future buying intentions and media consumption patterns of prospective customers and can be easily integrated with 3rd party datasets.

Helix Personas provides the ability to more efficiently plan and buy media against target audiences, optimise sales areas and develop highly relevant, tailored marketing and consumer communication strategies across all forms of media: digital, direct, broadcast, print and ambient. This simple case study illustrate the use of Helix Persona profiles during roll out of 7-Eleven stores in WA.

Roy Morgan Research has just announced the addition of a catchment area analysis feature. The application was built by Map Data Services.

Please contact aus-emaps.com at info@aus-emaps.com for advice on options for customer segmentation and sales area analysis tools - for any budget and any size of business. 

Related Posts:
Census 2011 Online Maps User Guide
Mapping Australian social diversity
How maps can improve sales
Reference Maps for Fusion Tables
Visualising Census data on maps

Sales Area Management Tool with Postcodes

# A Common Problem...

Defining and managing sales, franchise or dealership areas and territories is quite a tedious task without access to specialised GIS software. However, the cost of deploying such software within a business, or employing external consultants to help in creating hardcopy maps of territories, may be prohibitive for many.

# The Solution

Sales Area Management Tool from aus-emaps.com is an online application that will make the process of creating and managing sales territories much, much easier and it costs only a fraction of the other options.

# Content

Postcodes are the most popular spatial unit used for defining sales territories hence postal boundaries are included as a default option. They are small enough to allow quite precise definition of local neighbourhoods yet, there is a manageable quantity of them covering entire Australia. More administrative boundaries for Australia, as well as other countries, will be added progressively.

# Functionality

The tool is very simple to use and does not require any specialised knowledge.

Sale territories can be created by adding individual polygons to the list either by clicking on the desired polygons or by drawing shapes that approximate areas of interest on the map (drawing options include rectangle, circle or irregular polygon).

Alternatively, a comma delimited list of postcodes can be pasted into a text area under the map or postcode numbers can be typed in one by one.

Advanced conflict resolution process is implemented in this application to prevent creating areas with invalid postal codes or allocating a polygon to more than a single sales area.

For ease of identification, sales territories are coloured in random colours. Colour settings, including transparency, can be adjusted as required.

Each sales territory can be identified with a unique id and name. Individual sales areas can be edited or removed from the map if required. The result can be saved for reuse as a csv file or in JSON format, which preserves colour schema selected for individual sales areas. JSON version can be uploaded back to the application to continue with editing at a later time.

A convenient by-product of “radius select” function is ability to identify polygons that intersect with a circle of predefined radius from a selected point.

# Access

Version 1 of Sales Area Management Tools is available for customers as an advanced beta release. To arrange access, please email your request to info@aus-emaps.com with relevant contact details.

# Reselling Opportunities

There are attractive revenue sharing opportunities for affiliates co-marketing Sales Area Management Tool. Please, email your expression of interest to info@aus-emaps.com for additional details.

Google making inroads with Enterprise GIS

It looks that Google is finally making some progress in Australia with selling its GIS enterprise solutions to government clients. The first, and for quite some time the only public sector user of Google technology was NT government but just in the last few months three other State governments succumbed to Google’s charms. In particular, Western Australian Land Information System (WALIS) is upgrading its GIS capabilities with Google Maps Engine platform and has already started serving some data in OGC compliant web service standards.

Earlier this month the NSW Land & Property Information (LPI) released NSW Globe, which allows displaying a range of State data in Google Earth, and in the last few days Queensland’s Department of Natural Resources and Mines released its version as Queensland Globe - with almost identical list of datasets.

It is good that more and more data is made accessible for preview in a public domain. Let’s hope that these initiatives are only a beginning and will lead to more investment into a proper infrastructure to serve the data to third party applications.

Displaying data on a map is so passé. It was a thrilling functionality a decade ago but these days, in order to make a real impact, the data has to be put in context of tasks that community and business undertake on regular basis. Which is anything from looking up bus timetable to researching optimal delivery routes, from searching properties for purchase to collecting business intelligence for marketing purposes, etc. 

Google has already recognised that tools it offers cannot deliver all those solutions so the company is focusing its efforts on enabling linking of data served from Google infrastructure to open source tools like QGIS - to enable users performing more specialised spatial tasks.

Government agencies should ideally follow a similar strategy. The best return on all that data in State and federal vaults will be if application developers are allowed unencumbered access to it. Whether it is Google or ESRI or other technology facilitating the access is not that critical as long as there is a long term commitment to maintain it.

Related Posts:
South Australia opens its data
East coast unanimously frees data
Free data a GFC casualty
Governments intensify free data efforts
Data overload makes SDI obsolete
What’s the benefit of gov data warehouses?

Maps aid in gauging public opinions

Interactive nature of online maps makes them a great tool for engagement with local communities while soliciting feedback on various aspects of local life. The City of Cockburn in Western Australia has just deployed an innovative online application to survey the community about local transportation issues using the Google Maps API.

Visitors to the City of Cockburn Integrated Transport Survey page can comment on local transport issues and reference specific locations on a Google Map. In particular, users can search for a specific address then add a marker to the map and leave a comment categorising it into one of six transport related issues: congestion, road safety, parking, freight, public transport, cycling or walking related.

All comments are published immediately as interactive markers on the map as well as a twitter-like list. Other residents can vote on each issue by either agreeing or disagreeing with the author of the original comment.

This is a great example of using a simple online map as a low cost but very effective tool to reach a large number of members of a local community that otherwise would not have had the opportunity to raise their concerns. The application was developed by a group of Brisbane based specialists from Arup, an engineering and built environment consultancy, and is available for other projects under CollaborativeMaps.org banner.




First spotted on Google Maps Mania

Security standard for developers

I have been writing quite a lot about the standards recently - mostly about their deficiencies -  but today a few words about one standard that is really worth investing the time and effort into:  Application security  ISO/IEC27034.

It has been around for about 18 months so, it’s a relatively new concept but already adapted by the largest software development companies. Chances are it will become prominent enough to be demanded from contractors developing solutions for government and larger corporate clients.

From the introduction to the Standard:

ISO/IEC 27034:
a) applies to the underlying software of an application and to contributing factors that impact its security, such as data, technology, application development life cycle processes, supporting processes and actors; and
b) applies to all sizes and all types of organizations (e.g. commercial enterprises, government agencies, non-profit organizations) exposed to risks associated with applications.

The purpose of ISO/IEC 27034 is to assist organizations in integrating security seamlessly throughout the life cycle of their applications by:
   
• providing concepts, principles, frameworks, components and processes;

• providing process-oriented mechanisms for establishing security requirements, assessing security risks, assigning a Targeted Level of Trust and selecting corresponding security controls and verification measures;

• providing guidelines for establishing acceptance criteria to organizations outsourcing the development or operation of applications, and for organizations purchasing from third-party applications;

• providing process-oriented mechanisms for determining, generating and collecting the evidence needed to demonstrate that their applications can be used securely under a defined environment;

• supporting the general concepts specified in ISO/IEC 27001 and assisting with the satisfactory implementation of information security based on a risk management approach; and other standards.

A good starting point to learn about secure coding practices is a series of free courses/ video presentations offered by The Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code (SAFECode). You can read more about the Standard in a very interesting article by Lia Timson (The Age): If it's worth coding, it's worth securing.

Geoscience Australia new catalogue

Geoscience Australia has just released a new, map based catalogue to assist visitors to the site in the discovery and access to a diverse range of data, products and services available from the organisation.  Discovery and Delivery System is in beta release for public testing so, unfortunately not everything is working properly in Internet Explorer. However, you will still be able to find a lot of goodies there like, for example, over 100,000 historic Landsat-7 and Landsat-5 images over Australia captured between 2000 and 2010. These can be viewed as WMS overlays on the map or can be downloaded as data (in NetCDF format, but be careful, each scene is more than a gigabyte in size).

Mapping functionality of the catalogue is built with Google Map API. Backdrop map is a standard satellite overlay but users have a choice of several custom layers provided by GA, such as topographic map, land cover map, geology map or gravity map. 

The catalogue lists publications as well as data for use with GIS software. Advanced search option allows refining search criteria by specific theme, geographic location and time frame. Links provided in search results take users directly to a download page. The catalogue is a convenient way to discover what is available from Geoscience Australia although, at first, the choice may appear a bit overwhelming!

Related Posts:
Australian floods mapped
Google unlocks Landsat archives
Landslides in Australia
Continental reference image

Maps for Excel

The idea of integrating maps and spreadsheets is not new - both Microsoft Excel and Lotus 123 (for those who remember!) had maps embedded as far back as 1990’s. Yet, the usage of those maps never gained widespread popularity amongst spreadsheet users. On the other hand those who really needed to map their data were prepared to pay good money for the functionality. Some integrators did very well out of this, selling their plug-ins for up to $10,000 a user. Now Microsoft is making another attempt to integrate Excel and maps in 2013 version of the product. Microsoft is positioning this as part of its BI solution. Reportedly, it will be able to handle “big data” to the tune of "one million rows of data from an Excel workbook." The new functionality will allow users to geocode data as well as view geospatial and temporal data by creating thematic and heat maps.

[image courtesy of Excel Blog]

Google is already offering integrated spreadsheet, fusion tables and map solution through their Docs application so it is just a catch up for Microsoft. If history is anything to judge by, mapping data in spreadsheets will not become a mainstream use of Excel – simply because users will need to geocode all those “millions of records” in the first place - no indication so far as to how much this service will cost. Also, all those who deal with geocoding records know that it is not as simple as “pressing a button”. Not to mention that challenges with “processing of spatial data for 1 million points” have not been quite solved yet without a quite complex server setup so chances of doing anything useful with such vast amount of information, even within a desktop version of Bing Map, appear rather limited (in fact, some users have already commented about the performance). Spatial education within general population is another factor – general knowledge is increasing but is still not enough to deal with issues of “projections and datums” for spatial data and more advanced forms of analysis, beyond simple presentation of points on a map…

In my opinion Microsoft would have much better chances of success developing specific tools in support of specific business activities, with narrowly focused spatial functionality, rather than providing a generic DIY mapping capability. This strategy failed in the past but it seems to be a preferred approach by big players, including Google. Time will show if this time the outcome will be different.

Great collaboration tool from TeamViewer

Imagine a situation when you are trying to ascertain why your software “doesn’t work as it should” on your client’s computer and your client is located on the other side of the world… What if you could login to that user computer and see the problem yourself?

Or imagine a situation that you are on the other side of the world and do not have access to a specialised software locally but that software happens to be installed on you home PC. What if you could login and use that software remotely?  

TeamViewer is a great tool that allows to “take over” a computer remotely, via the Internet. Host application requires installation but the other end, that runs on remote computer, is just a simple runtime executable. Users at both ends just need to synchronise connection by exchanging a line of digits representing a password. It is so simple and no programming skills or convoluted setup required…

REIV maps auction statistics

The Real Estate Institute of Victoria (REIV) has turned to maps to present its latest set of property related information. In particular, the Institute now publishes a weekly update of auction clearance rates and information on prevailing sales methods by suburb. The information is presented on a Google map as a thematic overlay.

The Clearance rates by suburb map allows users to view information about total auctions, number of sales and a percent of successful sales for all suburbs with more than 20 auctions in 2012. Clearance rates for the suburbs are then compared to Melbourne-wide clearance rate. Individual suburbs are coloured based on whether their clearance rate is higher or lower than the average rate. 

REIV published also a set of maps that compare historical statistics on auction and private sales for 2010 and 2011. They provide buyers, sellers and anyone with an interest in the local market with data about the most popular sales method in each suburb. These maps highlight the fact that sales by auction are far less prevalent in the outer suburbs than the inner city.  A comparison of the use of auctions over time highlights the link with the state of the property market. That is, auctions are more popular when the market is stronger and private sales increase in popularity when there is a lower level of competition between buyers.

The maps are a part of ongoing effort by the Institute to provide timely, in depth analysis about the state of the property market in Victoria.

Related Posts:
Map of Melbourne house prices 
Sydney house prices
Maps and property investment
WA housing affordability index
Aircraft noise maps
Mapping sun position anywhere

Australian Floods Mapped

Earlier this week Geosciece Australia released a proof of concept web service displaying trial study areas of historical flood mapping derived from satellite imagery. It contains one low resolution national layer and several study areas in high resolution. The national layer displays a 500x500m grid summarising how often water was observed in specific location by the MODIS sensor from 2000 to 2012. A more detailed information, derived from Landsat-5 and mapped into a 25x25m grid is available for:

• Condamine River system between Condamine and Chinchilla, Queensland
• Northwest Victorian rivers between Shepparton and Kerang
• North Queensland rivers, near Normanton

Over the next two years this service will be developed into a nationwide portal to ultimately provide data on flooding which has been observed by satellite across Australia since 1987.

The information has some limitations as not all foods can be detected by satellites since observation of the Earth by satellite depends on clear skies and satellites have specific, scheduled observation times. Nevertheless, it’s a first attempt to map floods consistently across the entire continent and the service will provide valuable insights into flood patterns and food extents.

ACT implements free data initiative

Following federal government and larger States, ACT government is the latest convert to the cause of liberating vast holdings of spatial and non-spatial data in hope of invigorating local business to develop innovative solution and use the data for better decision making. And in the process, to stimulate economic activity and increase the number and quality of services offered to the local community. Built on Socrata platform dataACT is an open data service initiative that will enable individuals, businesses and people in the public sector to access, explore and build upon existing government data sets.

dataACT has three core components which make it probably the most functional of all the initiatives in Australia. In particular, data is available in a machine readable and consistent range of data formats. This enables users to download static datasets in ready to use formats (eg. JSON but unfortunately, stopping short of being a dynamic web service). Secondly, the platform includes some basic data visualisation tools to make graphs or maps that can be embedded on external websites. This enables the creation of customised views of datasets for particular community needs or specific initiatives. However, the most exciting news is that data is uploaded from across the ACT Public Service through data integration systems that will update individual datasets appropriately. So, there is a commitment from day one to keep the data up to date.

Initial set of released data is only a teaser but it is a good start. Let’s hope that the ACT government will not back on its commitment to the project and take a leading role in liberating the data that would really make a difference – for the local spatial community it means access to street data, cadastre information, address files and/or geocoding service, property transactions data (current and historical), 2m contours / DEM, topographic data, tourism database and high resolution imagery over the Territory. Don’t get me wrong. There was a time when a release of information on “toilet locations” generated a furore (and many goods apps were created as the result) but if the expectation is to make a significant and lasting economic impact, more useable data needs to be put in the public domain.

Other data liberation and spatial data infrastructure initiatives seem to be fading fast after the initial flurry of activities, including myriad of hack-a-tons with rich prizes for participants. It is, after all, a hard work which requires more than just “sticking a few csv files on a web page” and hoping for the best. Let’s be brutally honest about it, it would be hard to name a single “public data mart” initiative in Australia that can really claim a success so, there is a big opportunity for dataACT to demonstrate how it should be done.

Related Posts:
What's the benefit of gov data warehouses?
Free data a GFC casualty
Governments intensify free data efforts
UK unlocks vaults of spatial data

Data viz tool from DataAppeal

Continuing the theme of data presentation, I would like to mention another application that caught my attention and which may be of interest to readers of this blog - especially as it does not require any training in GIS. It is called DataAppeal and is a web-based visualization application that allows users to transform location- specific data, stored in tabular format, into 3D animated maps.

The company behind the application set a very ambitious goal - "to bring together concepts of art, design and spatial analytics to increase interest in sharing information and knowledge between users, for quicker and better decision making".

Users can upload numeric data with location reference and render it into a 3D map using Google Earth application. The users can choose from a number of design templates or customise display options to achieve the desired "look" that will enhance the message they want to convey. Basic features are available under free subscription option but heavy users can upgrade to a more advanced version of the product, if required. The URL link of the data-map can be posted and shared through various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter or just email.

All in all, DataAppeal is simple to use and offers no-cost introduction to visualisation of corporate data on 3D maps.

Reference Map for Fusion Tables

Reference Map for Fusion Tables is a free Web Application Service (WAS) provided by aus-emaps.com. The application enables displaying information stored in Google’s Fusion Tables as a thematic choropleth map. There are a few tricks you will need to know to put it to a good use. This post describes in detail how to configure Version 3 of the application to display custom choropleth maps (the concept of WAS is explained in an earlier post on this blog).

Firstly, some background information. Although Google included simple map configuration functionality within Fusion Tables, it is a manual process allowing formatting only one dataset at a time. If you have multiple columns of data available for mapping in a single table, the task of creating individual thematic maps can be quite a tedious process. Therefore, creating such maps programmatically, via Fusion Tables API, is the only viable option.

My recently released Census 2011 Online Maps application is an example of how to automate choropleth map creation process. There are two separate modules in that application. The first module enables selecting and analysing data stored in Fusion Tables, then formatting it for display as a thematic layer on a Google Map (ie. selecting number of classes, defining range break values and selecting colour scheme for thematic layer). The second module is a free-standing application, built with Google Map API, that displays the information from Fusion Tables as a thematic layer, formatted according to user requirements.

Now specifically about the mapping app. When designing Census 2011 Online Maps application I opted to incorporate Reference Map for Fusion Tables rather than coding mapping functionality from the scratch, but I had to update the application in order to enable proper formatting of numeric data retrieved from Fusion Tables. It also was an opportunity to expand the functionality of the reference map to enable generating thematic choropleth maps with 2, 3, 4 as well as 5 data ranges (five is a limit imposed by Fusion Tables API). All in all, the latest version of Reference Map for Fusion Tables now accepts a number of new parameters which enable quite extensive customisation of thematic layer for presentation on the map.

Below is a full list of accepted parameters and relevant options. Parameters flagged as “minimum” are compulsory in order to display Fusion Table in its “native style” (ie. as styled manually using relevant Fusion Tables functionality). “Optional” parameters can be omitted without degrading presentation of the information on the map. Please note, each parameter must be separated in compiled URL with “&” symbol.

Reference Map for Fusion Tables v3 – Acceptable Parameters:

ftl=  table id number eg: 1234567 [minimum]

q1c=geometry [minimum] - specifies which column contains spatial data

r1= defines the number of ranges for choropleth map: eg. 2, 3, 4 or 5

st1= thematic layer colour scheme selector, eg. b0=blue, pp0=purple, g0=green 2br0= blue-red; it is also possible to specify colours in reverse order as b0r, pp0r, g0r, 2br0r accordingly

qst1= SQL like data ranges specification; must correspond to the number of ranges specified for r1 parameter and be comma separated; column names must be between apostrophes; can  be either in ascending or descending order, eg.: 'Relevant Column Name' > 2030 AND 'Relevant Column Name ' <= 3035,'Relevant Column Name ' >= 0 AND 'Relevant Column Name' <= 2030  

q1=  SQL like WHERE query specification, to limit results to only specific set of data, eg. location: postcode > 1999 AND postcode < 3000  [optional]

n1= map title [optional]

xyz= allows to set map location and zoom level as longitude, latitude and zoom values, eg: 147.971361,-32.801441,6 [optional]

ad= can be used to hide ads on the map when set to 0, default is 1 [optional]


The following 3 parameters go together and are optional; each must contain the same number of variables separated by comma:

iw= allows to specify columns to be used to generate content of information window (“balloon”) that appears on the map when coloured polygons are clicked, eg. PC, D32 - if omitted the content of the window will be as specified manually using relevant Fusion Table functionality [optional]

iwalt= allows to specify alternative names for columns listed in iw parameter, eg. Postcode, Proportions of All Sales; default is column names as named in Fusion Tables [optional]

iwf= allows to specify format of numeric values returned from Fusion Tables, eg. n0, c2, %1, $0, where the first character indicates format option and the second (numeric value) specifies the number of decimal points; eg. if Fusion Tables column contains value 1.548  it will be formatted accordingly as: 1 (ie. “no format” and 0 decimal points),  1.55 (“comma format” for 1,000’s etc. and 2 decimal places), 154.8% (“percent format” with one decimal place) and $1 (“currency format” with 0 decimal places) [optional]. For columns with plain text use t0 code.

This is how fully compiled URL should look like:

http://www.aus-emaps.com/svs/ft/mapv3.php?
ftl=4369389
&xyz=147.971361,-32.801441,6
&n1=Median total family income weekly
&q1=name > 1999 AND name < 3000
&q1c=geometry
&r1=5
&st1=2br0
&qst1='B113' > 2030 AND 'B113' <= 3035,'B113' > 1484.5 AND 'B113' <= 2030,'B113' > 1194 AND 'B113' <= 1484.5,'B113' > 986 AND 'B113' <= 1194,'B113' >= 0 AND 'B113' <= 986
&ad=0
&iw=name,B113
&iwalt=Postcode,Median total family income weekly
&iwf=n0,$0

Finally, a short paragraph about the format of data in Fusion Tables that can be used with the Reference Map. The table must have polygons as a geographic component (eg. postcodes, suburbs, sales territories or other administrative boundaries) and it has to have a secondary descriptive column expressed as a number (eg. postcode number). The attributes to be mapped have to be numbers in order to divide them into meaningful ranges and to assign specific colours to those ranges. Those values could be any numbers representing characteristics of a given area (polygon) such as counts, percentages, densities or similar, or numbers used as “category descriptors” (eg. 1 means “mortgage stress belt”, 2 is “no mortgage burden areas”, etc...).

If it all gets too complicated, I will be happy to assist in setting up your own Fusion Tables account with a custom Reference Map.