I want to create some heat-map style tiles to overlay over our base maps using Open Layers. Basically, I want to divide some some bounding box into a grid, and display each square of the grid using a different color based on how many points of a sample fall within that grid square.
The technologies involved are C#, OpenLayers, SQL Server 2008 and GeoServer.
My question is basically one of general approach, I’m not really sure where to put the tip of the chisel on this one.
My ultimate goal is to be able to take any arbitrary bounding box, calculate an x-mile by x-mile grid that fits within that bounding box, the iterate over a collection of individual points and assign them to one grid square or another so I can calculate point density per grid square, then color the grid according to the densities, then overlay that on a CloudMade base map using Open Layers.
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated, on the whole thing or any piece of it.
If your bounding box is axis aligned, this is fairly simple. Just make your image, and create a world file for it by hand. The world file is just 6 lines of text, and you already know everything needed (x & y pixel size, coordinate of your upper left corner).
Just make sure that you use the CENTER of the upper left corner pixel, not the corner of the box.
—— Here’s how you’d make the world file ——-
Say your bounding box’s upper left corner is at 203732×598374, and you want an image that has rectangles that are 200m wide east<->west and 300m tall north<->south.
You’d make an image that was the appropriate number of pixels, then a world file that had the following 6 lines:
This corresponds to:
If you use a .png image, you’ll want to save this with the same name, but as .pgw. If you use a .jpg, it’d be .jgw, etc.
For complete details, see: Wiki on World Files