Hey all,
Just have a couple of questions about the SDK version.
1) Have there been any updates since I bought it back in ~'09? I notice that the item pretaining to it on the Customer Portal now states it comes with two DVDs, where as my copy is on a single disc.
2) In the database file for the Urbanareas shapefile, there is a field called 'POP'. Is there any way I can figure out what the values actually stand for?
Thanks very much!
-Dustin
Dustin,
I would like to answer your questions one by one below:
1, For the two DVDs, I think one is for the general WorldMapKit product, another is for the Mercato WorldMapKit product, as your copy I think it is just general WorldMapKit product.
2, The "POP" field is represented the population for each urban area record.
Hope it can help you above, if you still have any other questions please let us know again,
Thanks,
Scott,
Hi Scott,
Thanks for the help.
What kind of things does the Mercato disc provide? We’re looking at beefing up our current product and I’m trying to get a feel of if there are any extra goodies out there we don’t have yet.
Concerning 2, the values range from zero to seven, it’s not the actual population of the area. I assume that seven means ‘high population’, but I don’t know what that translates to in terms of actual numbers (ie does 7 mean a city of 100,000 or more people?) I suppose I phrased the question oddly the first time.
Thanks again!
-Dustin
Dustin,
The second disc data is the same as the first disc data except that the data is in the Spherical Mercator Projection. The first data disc contains the data in the Geodetic projection.
Can you tell me the exact shapefile name that you are referring to? The urban_dtl.shp contains a POPULATION column that might contain what you are looking for.
The USA data in the World Map Kit is based on the USGS TIGER dataset so some of the data's documentation can be found here:
census.gov/geo/www/tiger...006se.html
Hi Ryan,
The file I’m looking at is out of the World section, urbanarea.shp. While the TIGER documentation isn’t applicable here, I’m certainly going to bookmark it for future use. Thanks again!
-Dustin
Dustin,
If you still have any other questions please contact us again,
Thanks,
Scott,
Hi Scott,
Yes, I would still like to know if there’s a way to figure out what the values under the ‘POP’ column actually stand for in the urbanarea.shp file.
Thanks
-Dustin
Dustin,
The "POP" column of urbanarea.shp was added by us for the purpose of labeling and zoom level control in the World Map Kit. The values 1 to 7 represent the population rank, 1 being the highest population and 7 the lowest. I would not use this for statistical purpose as this was only created for labeling purposes (ex: labeling according to pop. size) and for displaying according to the zoom level.
Thanks Val, that’s actually exactly what I’m using it for (thought I don’t seem to be doing a very good job so far for some reason). Since there is no actual population value, that’s pretty much all I had to go off of. My question remains, though, what do these values actually mean as far as statistical ranges? That is to say, what population makes a city achieve a certain population rank?
-Dustin
Dustin,
The column "POP" actually has four disctinct values 0,5, 6 and 7. Most features being in the 0 values. The original urbanarea.shp did not have any population data so to be able to organize a little bit the feature according to the size of the urban areas we added that column. The values were added manually based on the size and we checked to see what the major agglomerations in the world were. You can notice that very few features have the values 5, 6 or 7. This was done for cosmetic reasons for labeling and zoom levels control only, so do not use that column for statistical purposes. I recommned you just ignore it.
Val,
I had no intentions on using it for statistical purpose, it was simply just a matter of curiosity of whether the ranks had tangible values or not. I appreciate the input. Thanks very much.
-Dustin
Dustin,
You are welcome. If you have any other question, let us know.