Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What other geospatial visualization tools should I know about?

Objectives

• See how Tableau, GeoViews, and other tools can be used in a data workflow.

Sometimes, complex plotting tools in Python aren’t precisely the best tool for the job, especially if “the job” is quick and dirty visualization, a more public-facing product, or a visualizing a huge data set. Here I list a couple of other tools which could be useful for other geospatial visualization tasks.

Tableau

Tableau is a robust data visualization software tool, used by businesses, governments, and researchers for myriad data viz purposes. Recently, it has experienced a large growth in geospatial capability. The strength of Tableau is creating visually appealing demonstrations of complicated data in an easy-to-use software program. Here’s an example of a Tableau geospatial visualization showing the history of Wilderness designation in the U.S.:

Holoviews + Geoviews + Datashader

Dealing with a huge quantity of geospatial data, and want an interactive visualization? Holoviews is a very powerful data-aware Python visualization library, and has a geospatial component called GeoViews. They have a great set of tutorials, including one about creating fast, easy to use maps with huge numbers of data points.

Key Points

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