Display Data on a World Map

When you open the Map panel, nodes on the canvas that have latitude and longitude property values automatically drop onto the surface of a 2D world map, rendered within the 3D canvas.

Nodes with no latitude and longitude coordinates, but connected to those on the map, are displayed above the map. Force-directed layout is the default; geometric layouts are preserved if they have already been applied.

Format for Latitude and Longitude coordinates

Geospatial data must be encoded in the data in separate latitude(lat) and longitude(lng) properties as follows:

Property Name Example Value

	Property Name	Example Value
Latitude	lat	`-74.006393`
Longitude	lng	`40.714172`

Latitude

lat

-74.006393

Longitude

lng

40.714172

The lat and lng values must be floating point, not strings.

For lat-long data encoded as strings, you can open the Transform > f(x) panel and use toNumber or a custom transform.

The .KML and .KMZ (Keyhole Markup Language/Keyhole Markup Zip) files used by mapping applications such as Google Earth contain properly encoded coordinates, and you can map these files directly in GraphXR.

Using the Map Panel

The Map panel includes:

Show Map to re-set the map (for example, after you have zoomed in to selected data, or flown away to a search location).
Hide Map to dismiss the map. The map disappears, but the nodes remain pinned until you release them.
Search Location bar to enter a place name and fly to that location.
Map Control to reposition the map and adjust its boundaries.
Setting to select a map server, install custom map servers, and set Wall or Floor mode and Auto Fitting options.

Show Map and Hide Map

Opening the Map panel automatically displays a world map, drops geo-located nodes onto its surface, and displays the rest of the connected graph above the map.

Click Hide Map to hide the map.
Click Show Map to:
- Show the initial map again after using Hide Map.
- Reset the map to its initial position after using Search Location or Map Control.

You can click the Map panel icon to dismiss the panel. This only removes the panel, not the map. When you are done working with a map, click Map to open the panel, then click Hide Map. To return the graph to a force layout, you must then Release the pinned nodes after hiding the map.

Fly to a Search Location

You can fly to any named world location or region on the map by entering its name in the Search Location bar. There does not need to be any mapped data for that location.

To fly to a named location:

Open the Map panel.
In the Search Location bar, enter the name of a location (e.g. United Kingdom) and click it on the search list.

The map centers on the named location.
To reset the map, clear the search by clicking the X icon in the search bar, then click Show Map.

Set Map Boundaries

Adjust map boundaries and other settings using the Map panel’s Settings and Map Control functions.

Set Map Settings and Servers

In the Map panel, click Setting to open the Map Setting dialog:

Select or de-select Auto Fitting, which sets map boundaries according to the lat-long values in the data. This is desirable at first, but de-select it if you want a margin maintained around the data.
Select an installed map server (e.g. MapBox, Google or OpenStreetMap)
Add or delete custom map servers.
Set Wall or Floor mode. Wall is the default.

Adjust Boundaries with Map Control

Use Map Control mode to adjust the map boundary temporarily.

A map initially takes either the entire world, or the locations in the graph data as its boundaries. Wider boundaries than the data provide are often desirable, to display margins or additional areas for which there is no data.

When you click Map Control, 3D navigation is de-activated.

To adjust map boundaries:

Open the Map panel and click Map Control.

The button turns blue, indicating you are in map control mode.
Set the map boundaries with the following mouse controls or their equivalent keyboard shortcuts:
- Pan (left mouse click_drag)
- Zoom (mouse scroll or 2+left mouse click drag)

Click Map Control to exit and resume 3D navigation with the adjusted map.

Whenever you click Show Map, map boundaries are reset to the initial area bounded by the locations in the data. To retain adjusted boundaries you set in Map Control, re-open the Setting dialog and de-select AutoFitting.

Navigate and Select Data on a Map

Once nodes are dropped on the map and you have adjusted the boundaries and other settings you can dismiss the Map panel.

The map persists until you open the Map panel, and click Hide Map, and then release its pinned nodes.

You can:

Use Rotate and Pan to change the 3-dimensional orientation of the map and its data on the canvas.
Use Center To to center on a single node or selection of nodes, and Fly Out to view all the mapped data.
Select nodes using any selection method, and perform any of the data transformations, editing, and tagging available in the project.
Use geometric layouts to organize nodes that are not on the map. Ring and Tree layouts can be especially effective.
Save mapped data in data views or snapshots.

For example, we want to quickly group locations by region, but the data doesn’t include a region property. We’ll take a few minutes to attach region tags to our data.

Select the nodes for a region, and click Tag to open the Manager Tags dialog.
Enter a region name for the tag, and click Add Tag.
Repeat, adding all the region tags needed.
Click Save Tags as Property to save the tags as a graphxrtags property, then use the Property list in the legend to set persistent colors for each value.

You can also set a color and icon in the legend’s Tags lis. If tags aren’t saved as a property, they appear as white bubbles in Tags, but do not appear on the Property list.

Here tags have been created to assign regions to groups of nodes.

You can use a tag (or its property value) to select nodes by region then click the Center To icon to zoom in to the center point of your selection on the map.