Gabmap

The operating system of the server where Gabmap is hosted was in need of an upgrade. The upgrade was conducted successfully and Gabmap should be working without problems again. If you encounter any issues with Gabmap in any of your projects, please first try to re-upload your data. Everything should work then. If not, please let me know.

Due to a hack, Gabmap has unfortunately been offline since December 2020. Since then, we’ve been hard at work to make Gabmap accessible again. As of today you should be able to login again and access your data. Please note that security of the server has been tightened. For this reason your original password has been changed. To obtain your new password, please fill in your e-mail address in the “Recover password” section on the login page.

There are two important updates to Gabmap which are important to mention:

The first update is that if you upload a kml file which contains polygons for each location in addition to the required points for each location (make sure the names are identical!), Gabmap will not use Voronoi tesselation to draw a small area around each point as usual, but will use the provided polygon. This may, for example, be useful when you collect data for specific regions. An example of such a kml file (for the UK) can be found here. The United Kingdom – BBC Voices project in the demo shows an example of the output using this kml file.

The second update is that you are now able to upload a weights file, in addition to the location file and the data file. This file should consist of two columns. The first column contains the place labels (identical to those in the other files), while the second contains associated weights (for example population size). The consequence of uploading this file will be that in addition to the original maps, a second set of maps will be generated in which the area of each location is scaled consistent with these weights. There are two approaches which are used for this, depending on the input data. The first is that instead of Voronoi tesselation (when places are associated with coordinates), a Voronoi treemap is generated which reflects the weights in the surface area of each polygon. The second approach is used when predefined polygons are associated with each location (see paragraph above). In that case a mosaic map is generated. You can take a look at the results of the final two projects in the demo account to see these types of maps. Note that these maps take a long time to generate (up to an hour). For this reason these maps are generated in parallel to the other maps. You will therefore be able to inspect the non-transformed maps before the weight-based maps are finished.

Gabmap has been updated regarding the input formats it accepts. From now on you are able to input the following files when entering the geographical information:

• A txt file where each line contains (tab-separated):
  Location        Longitude        Latitude
  Or a line starting with ‘#’, indicating this line is a comment and will be ignored
  See example: https://gabmap.housing.rug.nl/examples/Dutch613-coordinates.txt
• An xls(x) file in which every row contains three values (in three consecutive cells):
  Location Longitude Latitude
• A kml file which only includes coordinates of locations, but no polygons
• A kml file generated from within the sp R package and rgdal R package
• A kml file including both location coordinates and polygons (the original option)

Whenever no polygons in your input file are present, there are two options:

• You may select a country from the drop-down list: Gabmap will use a crude outline for that country as your polygon
• If you haven’t selected a country, Gabmap will draw a convex hull around all points in your dataset (+ 10 kilometers)

If a polygon has been generated, you will be able to download the resulting kml file in the ‘places’ output (“download generated kml file”).

Regarding the input data, Gabmap now not only accepts tab-separated text files, but also xls(x) files having the same pattern as before:

• The top row contains the labels of the items
• The first column contains the locations (matching those in the geographical file)
• The top-left cell is empty
• The cells contain the variants used in each place for each item
• See example: https://gabmap.nl/examples/Dutch613.xlsx

If you encounter any issues please contact Martijn Wieling!

Gabmap has migrated to a new server! Performance should be better and there should not be any SSL errors anymore. Unfortunately, if you have old projects it may be the case that not all options work anymore. In that case please create a new project with the same files. If there are any remaining issues, please contact Martijn Wieling.

A new version of Gabmap will be installed next Wednesday (20 February 2012) between 10:00 and 12:00 (CET). The new version includes major improvements on ‘Cluster Determinants’, and some minor bug fixes. Please do not hesitate to contact if you experience any problems. If you’d like to try the new version, you can already try it at http://gabmap.let.rug.nl/testing (the data is not shared with the main site, you will need to create a new account).

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