A discussion took place on twitter in the wee hours of Friday night. It started with a d-portal map of UNDP activities
Jonathan van Geuns commented:
Hmm… “This is a heat map of all activities that have been provided with precise locations.”
And so it started:
Just realized that most of these are likely “heat maps” of a country’s centroid #FakeHeatMaps
Bill Anderson
Numbers in the centre of a country refer to national programmes. Others will have more refined coordinates
James Coe
If truly national, surely a country code is suffice? A geocode only makes sense for a precise location (as stated). If implemented in one place but helps people nationally then geocode capital and use geographic location reach element?
Bill Anderson
Don’t you want to see all activities on a map?
James Coe
Yes, but properly coded. If activity is in 1 place but impacts nationally, use geographic reach element. Central geocodes add nothing.
RE Sieber
A map is a meaningful communication medium only if the spatial distributions are meaningful. Bunch of centroids w fake hotspots? Not so much.
Joshua Powell
I believe the location standard is explicitly subnational, no?
Bill Anderson
Who wrote that? (Watch out for 2.04 proposals)
So how would you represent an activity of national scope alongside others with specific locations?
RE Sieber
Cartographically, you can’t do both on the same map. Either show choropleth or pointilize all: call national scope a capitol (bldg) activity
James Coe
Could colour code difference between an activity w/ “actual location” and activity w/ “impact location”? TA projects being the former.
RE Sieber
It’s a feature dimension problem: points r 0D. If you really want 2D areas then you need to demand more x,ys. Long-standing prob w #IATI
Andy Lulham
- This is presentational, though. d-portal could choose to do it this way (or other ways) by deriving co-ords from recipient country(s).
- But adding spurious co-ords to data for presentational reasons seems objectively incorrect.
- Forces hand of presentational tools, & dilutes other data bc no way to tell which are accurate.
Bill Anderson
Do you honestly think that is a realistic, pragmatic solution?
RE Sieber
Realistic if IATI folks got together w GIS techs, who have lots of country & subnational boundary files. Maybe more users if data qual improved
I understand that impacts aren’t exact. But the all-areas-can-be-represented-by-centroids-and-we-can-lump-them-together isn’t working.
Bill Anderson
Perhaps standardising around administrative areas is a better option. But they do tend to change substantially over time …
RE Sieber
If that’s a problem, 1 option is to provide a GUI in schema for location: draw impact area on map. Another is bounding box
The onus isn’t placed on the user to do this – it’s on the presentational tools (e.g. d-portal; perspective). The end user should not be forced to deal directly with XML, or with co-ordinates, or derive co-ordinates from recipient countries. The tools should be in place to handle that.