I have a 125MB text file with tab delimited data.

I want to take a map of North Carolina with the county boundary lines, and I want to associate each line in the file with a county.

I have some ideas on how to do it by hand, using java (because that's what I know best), and I know SAS can do this, but is there some best/better way to do it?

and then, after the data is associated, i want the map to change colors based on a whatever column is chosen from the data.

[Edited on March 5, 2010 at 12:33 AM. Reason : ]

3/5/2010 12:31:53 AM

Number of ways to associate data with counties... can prob do it even in Excel?

For data visualization, get 30 day trial Spotfire 3.0 (cause the license is like $10k -- unless your employer has licenses available for your to use)
http://spotfire.tibco.com/

3/5/2010 12:53:14 AM

if you are talking GPS coordinates then tons of free waypoint software should be able to process it - including google earth.

3/5/2010 1:06:29 AM

Excel, Java and SAS can all do the "data lookup and association" no problem. The pain of it is then linking it back to the map to visualize. How many people are going to be accessing this how frequently?
A one time static map isn't difficult ... a dynamic map that is internet accessible is going to require some additional design for taking into account a 125MB text file.

3/6/2010 5:49:15 AM

http://openlayers.org/

3/6/2010 5:15:30 PM

This is just for my personal usage.

No employers or users involved.

3/6/2010 7:48:03 PM

If you're still a student you can download ArcGIS and do this very easily.

3/6/2010 9:51:19 PM

I thought arcgis was like mapping and topography focused...

3/7/2010 3:00:38 AM

Would using the Census Bureau's TIGER maps be beneficial in any way for this?

3/7/2010 4:53:18 AM

On SAS, if you don't know the visualization parts, and this isn't for graduate school, don't try. You'll spend hours in frustration trying to learn. (Granted, last version of SAS I used was v9 and things may have changes significantly, but I'm skeptical of that).

I know for my data mining class, I had a similar project. Collected geographical data by city across the US, grouped into various categories. Needed a way to visualize it. I actually ended up using MapPoint, which I had a legitimate copy of (I think through MSDNAA), which was able to create static images of all of the various data points.

3/7/2010 6:47:24 AM

^^^ Making a heatmap in ArcGIS is a 2 minute job.

1) Load map shapefile
2) Join Data
3) Configure heatmap display to your liking

3/8/2010 12:34:58 AM

^ i'll try that tomorrow to see what i can figure out.

3/8/2010 1:08:16 AM

^ This will help:
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/gis/virtcamp.html

Making a heatmap involves joining your data to a shapefile via common data fields like county names. They you just set your county shading to be determined by the value of interest in the later properties.

3/8/2010 2:15:01 AM