Mapping thousands of locations

September 27, 2005 5:07 AM

Location mapping. I want to map a couple of thousand points (latitude/longditude, csv/excel) across America and come up with a pretty picture as a result. Currently I'm thinking of using gmaptrack or the Yahoo! map API. Any alternate suggestions? Software is fine. I may also have to map the location of some chains across America to which I don't have the location data (but will come up in a google map search), any idea on how to do this?
posted by Mossy to media & arts (6 answers total)

http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/

GPS Visualizer will allow you to upload lat/longs in a bunch of formats including CSV. It'll pretty much cover most things if you 're happy with a static JPG as the result.

For the second part, if you can get the zipcodes of the chains from the Google Map Results you can use http://geocoder.us/ to convert the to lat/lon.

There's probably also a Greasemonkey script that'll get you the lat/long of the mouse cursor on the map, but I don't have the referance at hand.

If there's not too many chains that may help.
posted by RevDanCatt at 5:25 AM on September 27, 2005

I've used ArcGIS, but it ain't cheap...
posted by kuperman at 6:44 AM on September 27, 2005

I would recommend XPlanet which works very well for this purpose. Replace the default map with a larger Blue Marble one to make the output prettier. I use this program to visualize the location of people and to draw maps of bicycle tour routes.
posted by rycee at 11:42 AM on September 27, 2005

Microsoft Mappoint might do the job. Not sure the list price, since I had a friend get it from the company store.
posted by Good Brain at 1:46 PM on September 27, 2005

ArcGIS is very, very nice if you can afford it. Just hope you never get stuck on the devel end of ESRI... I think their developers were stoned when they wrote some of their API design.
posted by devilsbrigade at 8:30 PM on September 27, 2005

Thanks guys (and gals if any are present).

In the end I decided to go with the Google Map API to go for the prettiness/swish factor.

http://www.panoramio.com/blog/?p=11

Is definately something to read if you're dealing with more than 800 points on IE though.
posted by Mossy at 4:13 PM on September 28, 2005