I don't have any solid solutions, but it's a problem I've run into as well
in many uses. How do you simply visualize tribal or ethnic affiliation
areas with within a city where the populations overlap? How about comparing
multiple areal demographics data - most recently comparing poverty rates
with access to clean toilets [1]

One potential solution are to use non-contiguous surfaces, such as
dot-density maps. This seems to work well for Eric Fischers maps of Flickr
populations [2]. The New York Times used it as well in the mix-received
census demographic maps [3,4].

[1] http://www.sanitationhackathon.org/
[2] http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer?ref=us
[3] http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157624209158632/
[4] http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157624812674967/

I'm also curious what others have seen or tried.

Andrew



On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 1:21 PM, Andy Allan <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I've been working for a while on a system[1] that lets people log
> "issues" or "problem reports" geographically. A reporter can log the
> issue as having a point, line or polygon geometry.
>
> The problem that I'm facing is how to best show a map of issues for a
> given region, e.g. a town. They come in all shapes and sizes, often
> overlapping, and that causes an unintelligible mess[2].
>
> Any geowankers know of any sites that show multiple overlapping
> features in a useful fashion? Any guides to how to approach the
> problem?
>
> So far we've put in place to order by size (biggest at the back, of
> course), make fills translucent (but it still sucks if too many
> overlap), ignore polygons that entirely encompass the bbox - all
> certainly worth doing, but it's a long way from something to be proud
> of.
>
> Cheers,
> Andy
>
> [1] https://github.com/cyclestreets/toolkit
> [2] e.g. http://i.imgur.com/GafGb.png and http://i.imgur.com/Tl877.png
>
> _______________________________________________
> Geowanking mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
>



-- 
Andrew Turner
t: @ajturner
b: http://highearthorbit.com
m: 248.982.3609
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