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I am new to geographical data visualization, so I would like to ask if someone could recommend me some tool for easy visualization of data on map.

Particularly I have data from one European city and I need to visualize them as heat maps (eg. price based on the location, distance to transportation, etc.). I have some experience and already prepared non geo visualizations in Python (price in time plots, etc. in matplotlib), but I can code in matlab and Java as well and I am willing to learn something new.

This is as part of my thesis and they have recommended me tools like qgis or grassgis, but it seems to me like something completely different from programming that would be worth of semestral course and I don't have any experience with this at all. I have read also something about matplotlib and basemap, but it does seem to be more for at leas visualizations for whole country (I could not find any maps with city borders and roads).

My question is which way would you go? I am especially asking people who do some geo based "Data Science", which tools do you use to visualize quickly geographical data?

ziky90
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  • Have you looked at Google Heatmaps? It's still in experimental phase, but you can code it with a very limited subset of Javascript. [Here](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/layer-heatmap) is an example. – dpwilson Aug 15 '14 at 16:14
  • Why not at [Digital Signal Processing](https://dsp.stackexchange.com/) or [Software Recommendations](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/)? – sebix Aug 15 '14 at 17:08
  • Thank you for your suggestions. And I am sorry I didn't know about Digital Signal Processing and Software Recommendations, I was just used to use Stack Overflow for programming and questions related to it. – ziky90 Aug 15 '14 at 17:28
  • If you already know matplotlib, you might be interested in http://scitools.org.uk/cartopy/docs/latest/gallery.html and http://matplotlib.org/basemap/users/examples.html. – pelson Aug 18 '14 at 07:54
  • @sebix Please don't refer people to SR without a link to our [question guidelines](http://meta.softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/336/what-is-required-for-a-question-to-contain-enough-information) - we have very specific requirements for questions so that the site maintains its quality. Thanks! – Undo Sep 03 '14 at 03:07
  • @Undo Didn't know these special Guidlines on SR, thanks for the hint! – sebix Sep 03 '14 at 19:26

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People use R a lot for data visualization in Data Sciences. More specifically, you can look at packages like ggplot2. I think it might be exactly what you are looking for.

I've been working with matlab for over 2 years now and with python for a little bit over 1 year. When it comes to geographic heatmap, I was able to do things that were much more visually appealing after a couple of days of working with R.

Just a quick introduction to what R & ggplot2 can do: http://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/10881_80cc12ceb10a433bb3de48cfc7b42de7.html

Dennis C Furlaneto
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