Adding geographic context to your visualizations can present patterns that help you understand why things happen and what you can do to encourage certain behavior or change outcomes. The Esri integration built into SAS Visual Analytics makes it easy to create geographic visualisations using your data.
In this article I will show you how to visualise tourist attractions in Ireland and use Geo Regions to tell a story. In this example by visulising the density of those attractions for specific regions.
All data used in this article is publicly available through the Data.gov.ie website if you want to have a go yourself:
Attractions - Datasets - data.gov.ie The Attractions data set consists of a collection of tourist attractions with location data for the Republic of Ireland.
Geographic data provider feature services to be used for the regions:
Counties - OSi National Statutory Boundaries - 2019 - Generalised 20m - ArcGIS GeoService - data.gov.ie County boundary dataset generated from the 2019 OSi National Statutory Boundary dataset for Ireland
Province Boundaries Ungeneralised - OSi National Administrative Boundaries - 2015 - ArcGIS GeoService - data.gov.ie Ireland is divided into four provinces called Leinster, Ulster, Munster and Connacht.
To make it easier to follow along I've split this article into a series of demo videos which don't have any sound. Lets get started!
Import the Data
The first step is to import our csv data set containing tourist attractions for Ireland available here: Attractions - Attractions CSV - data.gov.ie
I did perform some data prep of the downloaded csv. I manually added the provinces to the data and standardised the county names which will help the geo mapping to work correctly. See the Geographical Lookup Values for SAS Visual Analytics 8.5 and Country and Region Subdivision Lookup Values. from the SAS Support website.
I loaded this data to create a CAS table in Viya:
Inspecting the data we can see the name of the tourist attraction, in which county and province it is located and the Latitude Longitude location.
We can visualise this information on a Geo coordinate map object.
Create Geography Data Items
The nest steps are to create Geography Data Items.
A geography data item is a category or measure whose values are mapped to geographical locations or regions. These are then used to visualize your data on a geographic map.
You can define a geography data item in the following ways:
By using predefined geographic roles such as country names, ISO codes, and so on.
By using longitude and latitude coordinates in the current data source.
By using a geographic data provider that contains geographic information that is separate from the current data source. The geographic data provider can be either an Esri feature service or a CAS table.
We've already seen how to create a geo data item using coordinates so next we'll use a geographic data provider to create the provinces and counties of Ireland.
In the video above I had already setup the geographic data provider. These are very easy to setup and Ordnance Survey Ireland kindly provide a number of ArcGIS GeoServices REST API's specific to Ireland.
Simply add the this URL for the provinces as the data provider and set the options below.
https://services-eu1.arcgis.com/FH5XCsx8rYXqnjF5/ArcGIS/rest/services/Province_Boundaries_Ungeneralised/FeatureServer
If you have you have your own ArcGIS server you can also use feature services from this instead.
Note: Special user permissions are required in SAS Viya to define and edit geographic data providers. Create, Delete, and Update permissions must be granted for the /maps/providers URI. For more information, see Manage Access to Features: URI Reference in SAS Visual Analytics: Reference.
Lets take a look and see how the province regions look on a Geo region map object.
We will repeat the same process above but this time to add the Counties.
Add the this URL for the Counties as the data provider and set the options below.
https://services-eu1.arcgis.com/FH5XCsx8rYXqnjF5/ArcGIS/rest/services/Counties___OSi_National_Statutory_Boundaries___Generalised_20m/FeatureServer
Ok, Lets see how the counties look.
We also want to create a Hierarchy data item, this will allow us to drill up and down between provinces and counties. A hierarchy is an arrangement of category columns that is based on parent-child relationships. The levels of a hierarchy are arranged with more general information at the top and more specific information at the bottom.
And Finally...
lets combine everything we've done into a Geo region-coordinate object.
We can map the individual locations for the attractions and show them within their County and Province region. We'll also use the frequency count for attractions to shade those regions so we can visualise which region has a high or low density of tourist attractions.
Enriching and visualising geo information within your data can really help to tell a story and bring the data to life. SAS Visual Analytics makes this very easy to do with no coding required.
I hope you found this post useful. Find more articles for SAS Visual Analytics here.
... View more
