Monday, February 10, 2014

SVG Maps

I want to start including advanced features from HTML 5 in my web projects. I am interested in using SVG for graphing and mapping applications; So, I just added an SVG map of Arizona Counties to the front page of Arizona Color. Unfortunately, older browsers such as internet explorer 8 do not render SVG; so I put the graph below the fold.

SVG is a human readable and editable file format. This means one can build graphs from very simple shape files and manipulate them on the fly. For this graph, I copied the shape files from a public domain document on Wikipedia. The data for the file came from the US Census Bureau's TIGER project. So, the next step is to decipher the TIGER Data. Unfortunately, while the TIGER data is public domain, it is stored in a proprietary format.

Anyway: Here is the map.

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