Heatmaps

Heatmaps

The heatmap functionality allows for highlighting areas of interest. These areas could be located around all features of a specific type, such as hospitals, but also around features with specific properties only, e.g., houses with specific energy labels. By changing the area of interest and the preference/avoidance factor, areas that fulfil your criteria will be highlighted.

Creating heatmaps

The most simple way of creating a heatmap, is by choosing a predefined map from the 'Layers' menu. This will load the existing heatmap from the project.json file. If the heatmap does not show up, the current zoom level might be not supported, so try zooming in or out.

An additional way of creating custom heatmaps is available in expert-mode only. When the expert-mode is selected, a heatmap icon will appear in the left icon bar. Clicking this icon will open the heatmap panel. This panel shows the currently selected heatmap, as well as the features it contains. To the right of the heatmap's name are four icons which respectively create, delete, edit or export the current heatmap. Creating and editing heatmaps is is a very similar process, creating a heatmap is basically editing a new heatmap. It must be noted that at least one feature layer has to be activated for creating a heatmap.

Clicking the create or edit button opens a modal window which allows the user to edit the heatmap parameters. First, the features of interest can be selected from a list of all features that are currently active. Selected features have an extra icon to their right, which allows for editing the ideality measure. This measure consists of three parameters: the weight at the feature location, the ideal distance and the maximum distance of interest. The weight ranges from [0,1] and it will always be 1 at the ideal distance, and 0 at the maximum distance of interest.

Exporting heatmaps

Once a heatmap is created, it can be exported. This allows for adding the heatmap to the project.json file, such that it can be added as a predefined demonstration layer. Clicking the export heatmap icon exports the heatmap to the developers console. The json-snippet that was printed to the console, should be copied to the project.json file in order to be included in the predefined demonstration layers. Please make sure to complete several field that could not be filled in yet, which are the heatmaps' id, reference, title and description fields. These fields can be recognized by being printed in CAPS.

Tips for creating heatmaps

The interpretation of the ideality measure is straightforward for positive weights: being at the ideal distance of a feature yields maximum ideality, and the ideality decreases when moving further away from the feature. Additionally, being too close to a feature might be less preferred, which is taken into account by decreasing the ideality at the feature. However, for features with a negative weight (the ones you want to avoid), this ideality measure is less logical, as being at the ideal distance from a feature gives a more negative value than being át the feature. To overcome this, you can fill in a '1' for the at location value and '0' for the ideal distance. In that case, the ideality measure will simply be a linear line.

Hovering over a grid cell in the heatmap shows a popup of the intensity of that cell. Clicking on a cell gives more extensive info, such as the features that contributed to the intensity of the cell.