Creating a Density Map Visualization

You can add a Density Map visualization to a Visual Insight quick dashboard, to display your data on an interactive map as areas color-coded based on the population density of locations on the map. For example, you can display areas with a high concentration of stores in red, and areas with a low concentration of stores in blue. You can:

Customize the color theme used to display areas in the map.
View the map in different display modes, such as a topographical map or a satellite image.
Zoom in or out on the map to recalculate and display color-coding based on the displayed map area.
Display Information Windows with additional information about a location when the user hovers the cursor over an area in the visualization.

Providing geographical information for the Density Map visualization

In order to display locations in the Density Map visualization, you must provide the latitude and longitude of each location using attributes or attribute forms. You can provide this data in the following ways:

During the Import Data process, you can define an attribute and assign it a geo role to identify what type of geographical information it contains. For example, you can create an attribute called City, which contains the names of multiple cities, then assign it the City geo role. XBRi automatically creates the City attribute with the attribute forms Latitude and Longitude, which contain the latitude and longitude of each city. You can then use the City attribute to provide latitude and longitude information for locations in the visualization. XBRi automatically adds latitude and longitude information as attribute forms to data columns with the Country, State, Zip Code, City, or Location geo roles. You can also use attributes that have been assigned the Latitude or Longitude geo roles to provide geographical information as attributes, as described in the prerequisites below. For background information on importing data into XBRi, including steps to assign a geo role to an attribute, see About Importing Data.
Your administrator can create attributes containing location data to support the Density Map visualization using the same steps they would use to create data to support the Map widget.

Adding a Density Map visualization to a Visual Insight quick dashboard

Prerequisites

This procedure assumes you have already created one or more attributes that provide the geographical location of each location in the Density Map visualization. The attributes must provide this information in one of two ways:
- To provide the geographical information using attributes, you must provide two separate attributes, as follows:
- - You must provide one attribute that contains the latitude of each location. For example, you can provide an attribute that has been assigned the Latitude geo role.
  - You must provide one attribute that contains the longitude of each location. For example, you can provide an attribute that has been assigned the Longitude geo role.
- To provide the geographical information using attribute forms, you must provide one attribute, which contains the latitude and longitude of each location in the Latitude and Longitude attribute forms. For example, you can provide an attribute that has been assigned the Country, State, Zip Code, City, or Location geo roles.
You must register your customer domain with Google and obtain a Google Maps API key.
You must deploy and configure the Google Maps Connector plugin.
You must have Edit Dashboard and Run Dashboard privileges.

To add a Density Map visualization:

Click the name of the quick dashboard to run it.
To add a new visualization to the quick dashboard, from the toolbar, click the Insert Visualization icon . Click Select Visualization. The Select a Visualization dialog box is displayed. Click the Map icon, then click the Density Map icon.
From the Dataset Objects panel, click and drag attributes to the appropriate area in the Map panel by doing one of the following:
- To provide the locations in the visualization using attributes, perform the following steps:
- 1. Click and drag the attribute that contains the latitude information to the Latitude area.
  2. Click and drag the attribute that contains the longitude information to the Longitude area.
- To provide the locations in the visualization using attribute forms, click and drag the attribute that contains the latitude and longitude information to the Geo Attribute area. The application automatically detects the Latitude and Longitude attribute forms and displays their names in the Latitude and Longitude areas.
By default, when a user hovers the cursor over a location in the visualization, an Information Window containing additional information about the location is displayed. You can include additional attributes to be displayed in the Information Window. To do so, from the Dataset Objects panel, click and drag the attributes you want to display to the Tooltip area.
To save your quick dashboard, click the Save As icon . The Save As dialog box is displayed.
Navigate to the location in which you want to save the quick dashboard, then type a name and description for the quick dashboard in the Name and Description fields.
Click OK. The quick dashboard is saved.