Geographically Analyze Data Using QlikMaps

With the business intelligence platform QlikView, you can access QlikMaps Extension Object, a mapping visualization and location-based analytics engine that does not require any additional server infrastructure. QlikMaps allows you to custom map territories and regions by using custom-defined shapes known as “Shape Files” and “Boundary Files”.

The Benefits of Using QlikMaps
QlikMaps offers a variety of benefits, including:

• Access to rich and interactive location analytics
• Street-level views and virtual visits of locations
• The opportunity to visualize relationships and directionalities among points plotted on the map, thanks to QlikMaps’ unique “spider” functionality
• Heat maps to allow for quick and effective visual understanding of data
• The ability to lasso points and polygons on the map to make selections
• Custom regions that can be integrated using custom shape file
• Multi-layer support, which allows you to add or remove any layer type with the click of a button
• Custom pop-ups for additional detail information
• Full functionality from all browsers and devices (through use of HTML5 and AJAX)

With QlikView, making a single selection in the dashboard will influence  all the reports in dashboard. Similarly in QlikMaps, you can select a region or location point using the lasso feature or clicking the particular entity twice.

QlikMaps useful features include:

• Polygon Mapping
• Point Mapping
• Multi-layering

Polygon Mapping allows you to display a transparent heat map on top of the map. This feature works similarly to the straight table in QlikView, and it allows:

• Popup labeling
• Configuring custom pop-ups (such as charts)
• Use of custom boundaries for the heat map
• Street views
• Use of custom colors
• Exporting of data to Excel
• Consider an example, in which a heat map is created as:

It’s clear that you are not able to see any underlying geographic data. In such cases, you can make the heat map transparent:

Point Mapping allows you to display the location of an entity in the map just by providing its latitude and longitude values. Additionally, you can:

• Use custom icons for specific entities
• Create different sized icons to show, at a glance, which entity has higher volume:

• Configure custom pop-ups (such as displaying charts)
• Use the lasso feature to select points
• Zoom in for more detailed map view
• Visualize a relationship between two points using “spider” functionality:

Multi-layering
Allows you to combine QlikMaps’ polygon and point mapping features, providing a geographic representation of the location along with its entities:

The benefits of multi-layering include:

• Pop-up functionality
• The ability to deselect any layer with a single click in the checkbox
• A lasso feature
• The ability to search for geographic locations

Custom Defined Shapes
Another useful feature of Qlikmaps: It allows you to use custom boundaries for  a custom location or region.

For example, consider the United States with all state boundaries delineated:

With tools like ArcGIS and QGIS it’s easy to create four regional areas within the U.S. map:

It’s possible to use similarly defined shapes in Qlikmaps.
Creating custom boundaries is a two-step process, which involves:

• Creation of shape files (.shp) using geographical data in ArcGIS. In this step, you take a zip and territory/region map and join with the base file of ArcGIS, to create the shape file (.shp) for your custom data.

• Converting the .shp (shape file) file into a .csv file using the QGIS Tool to create boundary files. Below, we have a shape file from the ArcGIS tool; the same can be converted into a boundary file in .csv format in QGIS.

For more information about these capabilities and improving your business analytics systems, contact us today.