It has always been possibl email list providers in france to incorporate your own shape files but this has always required specialist skills and behind-the-scenes access in order to configure the system to allow for customised maps.
In this blog, we will show new developments in FastStats that make it much easier for the end-user to build thematic maps from shape files directly.
In a previous blog post (see Note 1) we analysed data from police reports on UK traffic accidents. Map visualisations on this data using our standard shapefiles would have been impossible as there were no postal variables defined in the source data. Furthermore, accidents wouldn’t naturally fit into this type of data as a sensible unit for analysis by. Each accident did contain latitude and longitude information to give its exact location so a user could produce plot maps of say locations of significant accidents, but the granularity of the produced map would mean that it couldn’t provide insight into good overall trends within the data. Finally, it couldn’t be used to look at visualisations at police force level (e.g. what is the average number of vehicles involved in accidents by Police region – but visualised on a map).
Each accident record was also attributed to the police force responsible for it, and each of those forces have a particular geographical area of operation. Being able to analyse and furthermore visualise that information is valuable. However, FastStats does not come with pre-configured shapefiles for ‘police force area’ in it.