I love maps, I love geo-spatial open data. And last year, I plugged in Canada's population data into our region maps for the advent calendar. At that time our maps application was in development mode. But now its here and its awesome. So, lets see what we can do with it.
In my opinion, one of the coolest features of our maps app is the ability to ingest geospatial data on the app itself instead of having to do it in Elasticsearch. This removes an additional step for users who want to ingest their geospatial data, visualize and ask questions directly in Kibana.
So how do we do this? Open the maps app in your Kibana, click on a new map-> click on add layer and you can see that - there are multiple possibilities for adding your dataset. We are going to be using uploaded GeoJSON layer capabilities in this example.
I chose Parks Canada datasets because Canada is full of gorgeous national parks. These are the steps I went through to ingest the data:
- Open maps app
- Click on create new map
- Click on add layer
- Choose EMS boundaries and pick Canada Provinces (because I want to map the data by province)
- Uploaded the geoJSON for visitor information, attractions, and finally campsites
- I also wanted to see if any of this data had overlap with Inuit Region boundaries. So I added the Inuit region boundaries by using the WMS url layer.
The resulting map looks like this:
Yay?? Not yet. I am going to clean up the layers a bit so it becomes easier to identify all the data points which are of interest to me. You can see from the screenshots below that you can apply different zoom levels for different layers, you can change the fill colors and the border width and also pick which tooltips you want to display:
I am going to do it with all the layers.
Oh wait - what happened here? Some of the layers look disabled.
That is because I set the zoom levels of the layers to different levels so that the UI doesn't look cluttered. Go maps team! The screenshot here shows the campsites and attractions in Nova Scotia.
I always wanted to go to the tundra and if I head there and zoom in and keep zooming in to the vast wilderness- voila there is a datapoint of attraction in Inuvialuk. And that is "La Ronciere Falls" and its in Tuktut Nogait National Park.
Note the distance between the falls and the nearest campsite. Saying its isolated is probably an understatement. You need to be an experienced wilderness traveler to get here. There are canyons, bears(both grizzly and polar), muskoxen and numerous water falls. But the journey definitely looks rewarding.
I hope you enjoyed this quick peek through some of the possibilities in the maps app. There are lot of learning resources for the maps app at elastic.co.