[BangPypers] Fwd: India Map by State for Viz

[Gora Mohanty]

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 6:06 PM, Venkatraman S <venkat83 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I had sent this to Chennai-LUG, any thoughts from this group?
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Venkatraman S <venkat83 at gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 8:57 AM
> Subject: India Map by State for Vizilab
> To: ILUG-C <ilugc at ae.iitm.ac.in>
>
>
> I was wondering whether there is anything similar for India(which allows us
> to show viz by state):
> http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/intensitymap.html

What do you mean by "anything similar for India"? Are you asking whether
there is an already-existing site that does this, or are you asking whether it
is easily possible to do this? Assuming the latter, please see below.

> (The above does at the country level)
>
> Also, is there anything similar for mapping countries, other than that of
> Google?
[...]

It is possible to do both of the above quite easily (2-3 days of work for a
rough-and-ready protoype), with FOSS tools. You would need to:
(a) Get files that define the geometry of countries, and of Indian states.
     I know that .SHP files providing such polygons/multi-polygons are
     freely available for countries, Indian states, and even Indian districts.
     I can dig up links to such files if you are interested.
(b) Decide on a GIS framework to use for the site. Personally, I would use
     GeoDjango, which makes it easy to import .SHP geometries, and to
     handle geospatial data. For the presentation layer, one could use either
     Google Maps (easy to get set up), or preferably OpenLayers
    ( http://openlayers.org ) along with GeoDjango. OpenLayers is significantly
    more complex, and a little weak on the documentation front (though, there
    are many examples available), but a lot more flexible, and one is not tied
    to Google Maps.
       Using the OpenLayers Javascript by itself, or Drupal and the Drupal
    OpenLayers module is also a possibility.

Regards,
Gora