d3.js Merging County Polygons into Districts - d3.js

I'm trying to merge counties from a "us.json" TopoJSON file into their respective agricultural districts. I've followed the "Merging States II" code found here: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/5416440 and it works as intended. The only problem is that it takes 10-15 seconds to load in the browser because of all the processing that is going on.
I have to believe there is a more efficient way to do this task; maybe even merging the polygons ahead of time using TopoJSON, but I'm not as familiar with that program so I'm at a loss as to how to proceed.
The html and JSON lookup files can be found at the GitHub Gist below
https://gist.github.com/nautilytics/6719443
Any comments or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the comments. I was able to export the three different shapefile layers from ArcGIS and then toss them into http://mapshaper.org/ to simplify them. Then I used the TopoJSON command line tool to combine them all into a single JSON file. Works amazing.
Final output: http://nautilytics.com/NASS-Corn-Acres-Planted/

Related

Is there a way to change the projection in a topojson file?

I am trying to create a topojson file projected using geoAlbersUsa, originating from the US Census's ZCTA (Zip Codes, essentially) shapefile. I was able to successfully get through the examples in the excellent https://medium.com/#mbostock/command-line-cartography-part-1-897aa8f8ca2c using the specified maps, and now I'm trying to get the same result using the Zip Code-level shapefiles.
I keep running into various issues due to the size of the file and the length of the strings within the file. While I have been able to create a geojson file and a topojson file, I haven't been able to give it the geoAlbersUsa projection I want. I was hoping to find something to convert the current topojson file into a topojson file with a geoAlbersUsa projection but I haven't been able to find any way.
I know this can be done programmatically in the browser, but everything I've read indicates that performance will be significantly better if as much as possible can be done in the files themselves first.
Attempt 1: I was able to convert the ZCTA-level shapefile to a geojson file successfully using shp2json (as in Mike Bostock's example) but when I try to run geoproject (from d3-geo-projection) I get errors related to excessive string length. In node (using npm) I installed d3-geo-projection (npm install -g d3-geo-projection) then ran the following:
geoproject "d3.geoAlbersUsa()" < us_zips.geojson > us_zips_albersUsa.json
I get errors stating "Error: Cannot create a string longer than 0x3fffffe7 characters"
Attempt 2: I used ogr2ogr (https://gdal.org/programs/ogr2ogr.html) to create the geojson file (instead of shp2json), then ran tried to run the same geoproject code as above and got the same error.
Attempt 3: I used ogr2ogr to create the geojson sequence file (instead of a geojson file), then ran geo2topo to create the topojson file from the geojsons file. While this succeeded in creating the topojson file, it still doesn't include the geoAlbersUsa projection in the resulting topojson file.
I get from the rather obtuse documentation of ogr2ogr that an output projection can be specified using -a_srs but I can't for the life of me figure out how to specify something that would get me the geoAlbersUsa projection. I found this reference https://spatialreference.org/ref/sr-org/44/ but I think that would get me the Albers and it may chop off Alaska and Hawaii, which is not what I want.
Any suggestions here? I was hoping I'd find a way to change the projection in the topojson file itself since that would avoid the excessively-long-string issue I seem to run into whenever I try to do anything in node that requires the use of the geojson file. It seems like possibly that was something that could be done in earlier versions of topojson (see Ways to project topojson?) but I don't see any way to do it now.
Not quite an answer, but more than a comment..
So, I Googled just "0x3fffffe7" and found this comment on a random Github/NodeJS project, and based on reading it, my gut feeling is that the node stuff, and/or the D3 stuff you're using is reducing your entire ZCTA-level shapefile down to ....a single string stored in memory!! That's not good for a continent-scale map with such granular detail.
Moreover, the person who left that comment suggested that the OP in that case would need a different approach to introduce their dataset to the client. (Which I suppose is a browser?) In your case, might it work if you query out each state's collection of zips into a single shapefile (ogr2ogr can do this using OGR-SQL), which would give you 5 different shapefiles. Then for each of these, run them through your conversions to get json/geoalbers. To test this concept, try exporting just one state and see if everything else works as expected.
That being said, I'm concerned that your approach to this project has an unworkable UI/architectural expectation: I just don't think you can put that much geodata in a browser DIV! How big is the DIV, full screen I hope?!?
My advice would be to think of a different way to present the data. For example an inset-DIV to "select your state", then clicking the state zooms the main DIV to a larger view of that state and simultaneously pulls down and randers that state's-specific ZCTA-level data using the 50 files you prepped using the strategy I mentioned above. Does that make sense?
Here's a quick example for how I expect you can apply the OGR_SQL to your scenario, adapt to fit:
ogr2ogr idaho_zcta.shp USA_zcta.shp -sql "SELECT * FROM USA_zcta WHERE STATE_NAME = 'ID'"
Parameters as follows:
idaho_zcta.shp < this is your new file
USA_zcta.shp < this is your source shapefile
-sql < this signals the OGR_SQL query expression
As for the query itself, a couple tips. First, wrap the whole query string in double-quotes. If something weird happens, try adding leading and trailing spaces to the start and end of your query, like..
" SELECT ... 'ID' "
It's odd I know, but I once had a situation where it only worked that way.
Second, relative to the query, the table name is the same as the shapefile name, only without the ".shp" file extension. I can't remember whether or not there is case-sensitivity between the shapefile name and the query string's table name. If you run into a problem, give the shapefile and all lowercase name and use lowercase in the SQL, too.
As for your projection conversion--you're on your own there. That geoAlbersUSA looks like it's not an industry standard (i.e EPSG-coded) and is D3-specific, intended exclusively for a browser. So ogr2ogr isn't going to handle it. But I agree with the strategy of converting the data in advance. Hopefully the conversion pipeline you already researched will work if you just have much smaller (i.e. state-scale) datasets to put through it.
Good luck.

Troubleshooting topojson installation

I'm new at this an essentially have very little idea of what I'm doing.
(FYI I'm working off of this tutorial:
http://bost.ocks.org/mike/map/)
I'm trying to get topojson to work.
I've successfully installed homebrew and node.
I've done the
"npm install -g topojson" part as well.
And then, after that, when I try to type in the "which ogr2ogr" etc -- just, nothing happens.
He says if having trouble to edit path variable environments. I have only a vague idea of what that means, and not sure if that's my problem or not.
Let me know what other information you need. I really just want to make a map. The global install does seem to have worked. I just don't know what to do from here.
The tutorial you linked to is a great starting point. I wish I'd seen it before trying to figure everything out on my own. :)
From what I understand, you probably missed the step in which you install gdal. If you're seeing some other errors, please post them in your question.
You can get ogr2ogr working by running:
brew install gdal
Here's some background info for you, so you'll get a better understanding of what's going on there.
topojson and ogr2ogr are two distinct utilities. ogr2ogr is part of the gdal package and in our case is used to generate GeoJSON from a shapefile.
GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that
is released under an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open
Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single
abstract data model to the calling application for all supported
formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities
for data translation and processing.
TopoJSON is used to compress the rather large GeoJSON output from the previous GDAL conversion. It reduces redundancy by specifying paths with arcs rather than discrete points. It's pretty neat, actually:
TopoJSON is an extension of GeoJSON that encodes topology. Rather than
representing geometries discretely, geometries in TopoJSON files are
stitched together from shared line segments called arcs. TopoJSON
eliminates redundancy, offering much more compact representations of
geometry than with GeoJSON; typical TopoJSON files are 80% smaller
than their GeoJSON equivalents. In addition, TopoJSON facilitates
applications that use topology, such as topology-preserving shape
simplification, automatic map coloring, and cartograms.
The output of these two steps (shapefile -> GeoJSON -> TopoJSON) will be a JSON string which is easily interpreted by JavaScript. You'll need to use topojson in your drawing code to convert back to GeoJSON for actually drawing the map.
Recall from earlier the two closely-related JSON geographic data
formats: GeoJSON and TopoJSON. While our data can be stored more
efficiently in TopoJSON, we must convert back to GeoJSON for display.
Breaking this step out to make it explicit:
var subunits = topojson.object(uk, uk.objects.subunits);
For ubuntu, I used this way to have ogr2ogr
sudo apt-get install gdal-bin

Generating vector data (points) for OpenLayers Cluster

In my web application I am going to use OpenLayers.Strategy.AnimatedCluster strategy due to the fact that I need to visualize a great amount of point features. Here is a very good example of what it looks like. In both examples in above mentioned example the data (point features) are generated of taken from the GeoJSON file.
So, can anybody provide me with a file containing 100 000+ (better is even 500 000+) features (world cities, for instance), or explain how I can generate them so that they will be located all over the world (not like in Spain in the first example in above mentioned link).
use a geolocation database to supply you the data you need. GeoLite, for example
If 400K+ locations is ok, use download their CSV CITY LIST
If you want more, then you might want to give the Nominatim downloads, but they are quite bulky (more than 25GB) and parsing data is not as simple as a csv file.

Bash Stacked Column

this is the first time I have posted here.
I am trying to make a stacked column in BASH but I cannot seem to get anywhere. I just have three different columns of data I would like to stack over time. I was able to do it in excel, but not sure how to get it to work in BASH.
I did find a similar question in this site but for a different program.
plot stacked bar plot in R
But I would only need one of the charts and not two. So if anyone knows how to do a similar graph in BASH, please let me know. I'm new to programming, so sorry if it is a dumb question.
Thanks...
There is a very simple to use java package called livegraph (http://www.live-graph.org/). You feed to it an input file, with a few metadata lines on top of the input file, and it graphs it for you, in real time too. I used it in Ubuntu and it worked like a charm.

Feature Extraction from Images to use with LIBSVM

I'm really stuck right now. I want to apply LIBSVM for Image Classification. I captured lots of Training-Images (BITMAP-Format), from which I want to extract features.
The Training-Images contain people who are lying on the floor. The classifier should decide if there is a person lying on the floor or not in the given Image.
I read lots of papers, documentary, guides and tutorials, but in none of them is documented how to get a LIBSVM-Package. The only thing that is described is how to convert a LIBSVM-Package from a CSV-File like this one: CSV-File. On the LIBSVM-Website several Example-Data can be downloaded. The Example-Data is either prepared as CSV-Files or as ready-to-use Training- and Testdata.
If you look at the Values which are in the CSV-File, the first column are the labels (lying person or not) and the other Values are the extracted features, but I still can't reconstruct how those values are achieved.
I don't know if it's that simple that nobody has to mention it, but I just can't get trough it, so if anybody knows how to perform the feature extraction from Images, please help me.
Thank you in advance,
Regards
You need to do feature extraction first. There are many methods that are available. These include LBP,Gabor and many more.. These methods will help you get the features to input into libsvm..Hope this helps...

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