Geospatial shapes for vizualisation

Putting analysis on a map
People always seem to like seeing data visualised on a map. Something about looking at a gradient of colour on a map makes people feel like they are empowered to understand.
Shape files
High resolution shape files are great for accurately allocating coordinates (latitude, longitude) to geospatial areas (polygons) but can be very large and not so great for rendering lower resolution dynamic maps in dashboards.
I was looking at the Australian Remoteness Areas published by Australia’s Bureau of statistics. The geojson
file is around 110 MB, which is too much to download over HTTP to load up a data visualisation on a webpage.
Reducing the size
I found this really great blog and followed the steps to reduce the geojson
file to 1% of it’s size and then produced the map you see a static screenshot of in this bog post.
Visualising a GeoJSON
I highly recommend using this VSCode extension if you are working with Geospatial data files. I used this to view the GeoJSON and filter the features and colour the features by metrics.
Working project
A reference to the code (Python) I used to do a few other geospatial data manipulation steps.