Maps - Custom Image backgrounds Part II

The Voyageurs Wolf Project was an initiative taken by University of Minnesota in collaboration with the Voyageurs National Park to study the ecology of wolves and their prey(moose, dear, beavers etc) during the summer in Great Voyageurs ecosystem. Specifically this research was aimed at studying the movement pattern of the wolves and its reproductive ecology.

To track the movements of wolves and their packs, the researchers targeted multiple wolves of 4 different wolf packs and attached a GPS tracking device to the animals. The location of these wolves were tracked every hour for 3 alternate days. The results are fascinating and present a great use case for data analysis. Researchers have a specific image covering the habitat of Voyageurs National Park and they have a set of Lat/Longs representing the positions of the wolves over time, they need to visualize these positions on top of the habitat image. Oracle Analytics provides a very simple way to easily achieve this. Users have the ability to upload any images as map backgrounds and to create map layers on top of these images. In case you missed it, here is a blog entry which covers this feature in detail.

An Oracle Analytics user can upload the image of the National Park, and could take the approach of manually creating points (as a layer), representing possible positions of the wolves on top of the image. But with the amount of distinct Lat/Longs positions in the data, this process would be too hard or too long. The number of points is going to be huge and building a pre-set layer process will turn out to be a real pain.

Great news : that there is a much simpler and elegant way to achieve this, where we wipe away the manual and error-prone step of creating of point layers on top of the image. Oracle Analytics allows to directly plot Lat/Longs data (or any coordinates) on top of any image used as a map background. No need to create any layers !

Here are the simple steps to be followed to achieve the result

1) Upload the image of the national park as a map backgrounds

Image of Voyageur National Park

2) Upload the dataset having the position of the wolves and their corresponding positions.

Dataset used for the experiment

3) Find the National Park image background from the Maps Console and choose the Inspect option. By default the coordinates are set to Auto

Now choose Custom(Lat,Long) from the drop down. This prompts to enter the bounding Lat/Longs for the image

The bounding box of the lat/long covered by the Voyageur National Park can be easily obtained through a simple web search and we will be using that information to fill the above fields.

After entering the values for Lat/Long, click on the Save button to save the changes made to the image background.

4) Create a project using the dataset, drag and drop the Lat and Long columns on to a canvas and select map viz. The Map Viz will default with a world map background, and plot the points on the default map background.

5) Go to the viz properties and change the background map to Image background depicting the Voyageurs National Park : click on map viz properties (bottom left), click on the Map icon, and select the Voyageur National Park Map backgrdound we just uploaded

and you should see the wolf positions on the image background.

The color represents the different wolf packs that were involved in the research. It is a pretty visual point that distinct wolf packs seem to avoid each other’s range. They generally avoid being around each other unless they are fighting for food that may be in short supply. When that occurs, they may engage in battles with other packs in order to continue have their claim on a given location as well as the food found within it. 

So Oracle Analytics not only allows user to upload any images as backgrounds for map visuals, but provides the ability to either define layers on it, or directly use coordinate systems to plot any amount of points data on the image directly. That allows pretty visual representations of the data. This blog entry leveraged direct Lat/Long information for, this, in an upcoming blog entry we will highlight how this can be used with different use case, such as shop-floor traffic.