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Create your own heat maps and thematic map charts for data representation

By Ko Fai Godfrey Ko

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 02Mar2010 Word count: 439 Viewed: 544 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Thematic maps are often considered to be a type of heat maps that are designed to show a particular theme, sometimes refer to as choropleth maps, which is related to a specific geographic region.

If you want to represent your data with respect to some specific location, e.g. countries of the world, the 50 United States, or US counties, you can think of using thematic maps.

Thematic maps make use of color-coded areas to show geographic patterns in statistical data, like that of the population or median income of a specific area. There are various types of thematic maps that include choropleth or shaded maps, proportional symbol maps, dot maps, and isarithmic (contour) maps.

The cartographers who design thematic maps need to keep several important factors in mind, the most significant one being the map's targeted audience. Knowing who are going to use the map will help the cartographers to decide on items that should be used as the reference points as well as the map's theme.

For example, a political scientist would need the map to show political boundaries while a biologist may ask for contours to be depicted on the map.

You can use thematic maps to get:

* specific information about a particular locality

* general information related to spatial patterns

* a comparison of patterns between two or more maps

Since the sources of your own map data on which the thematic maps based on are very important, they need to be collected with utmost caution and care.

That is why cartographers need to find up to date, accurate and reliable sources of information that cover a wide variety of subjects - ranging from demographic data to environmental features, in order to create the most effective and useful maps.

If you now think that its really a difficult task to create thematic maps by considering all the factors as mentioned above, take heart for technology is here to make the creation of thematic map easy for everyone.

You can now find downloadable mapping software for Windows desktop, or online based solution which can help you to generate your own maps, such as a customized thematic maps that will not only suit your needs the best but even help you check the accuracy of map data.

What's more, some software can even help you select the way in which you can display data, ensuring at the same time that it matches the map's theme.

In case you have thinking about whether to use thematic maps or not for long, chuck away the skepticism and use these maps today to enjoy their benefits for more profits and expansion of business.

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