[Editor’s note: I saw this album art CD cover at Starbucks last week. KCRW, the streaming public radio station out of California, puts out yearly live studio performance albums. This one features the likes of Dido, Rufus Wainwright, and Girls in Hawaii. The artists are arranged along subway lines with stations labeled with artist names. Not sure if there’s a rhyme or reason to the layout, but the result is cool. ]
[Editor’s note: Heat maps are a useful way to qualitatively represent densely clustered point locations on a map. This post from GeoChalkboard walks thru how to create using the Google Maps API and the HeatMap API.]
Republished from GeoChalkboard, there on March 11, 2009.
In the GIS world heat maps are a graphical representation of point data on a map through the use of colors that indicate the density of some variable such as crime incidents or traffic accidents. Heat maps let users quickly visualize the density of locations. Being able to understand the density of point locations makes it much easier to see patterns in your data, especially when using colors. In this post we’re going to examine the HeatMapAPI, a JavaScript API for creating heat maps in Google Maps.
(Above) 2009 Starbucks Store Closures
Introduction
HeatMapAPI can be used over the Internet or as a .NET DLL that runs in a local environment and allows you to integrate heat map images into Google Maps or other GIS systems. In this post we’re going to use HeatMapAPI to visualize the density of recent Starbucks store closures. In a recent statement, Starbucks announced the closure of 600+ stores in the United States due to economic conditions.
