US State Maps Visualizations

[tschuman13]

I'm liking a lot of the new visualizations in AR so far, and the animations have been very well received by the customer.  I am getting a lot of requests for US State Map/Heatmaps to show which states are under/over performing based on a color.  All I have is the old Cognos 8 US map which looks very dated.  Is there anything new I can use to take advantage of the AR interactivity and features?  I would like to have my existing sliders, radio buttons, etc work with the map and not need to use the old Prompt items.

What is everyone using for this in AR?  The IBM website has a picture of a US Map that looks very nice here:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/analytics/cognos/business-intelligence/active-report.html

but I cant find any reference to find it. 

[MFGF]

Hi,

I suspect the AR you are referring to on the IBM site is still using the old C8 map of the USA, but I can't be sure. I don't think it would be a huge task to create a visualization shaped like the USA if you have the right programming skills, and it's quite possible that someone may already have created one? It's not one that I have, though, sadly.

Cheers!

MF.

[bdbits]

Native maps in Cognos are a bit dated. There is limited support for importing shape files from other sources. Much better, with a little javascript and effort on your part, you can interface with Google Maps, or with ESRI if you have it, and probably some others. There is information on developerworks and other sources with details on doing this, sadly I do not have a link handy at the moment. I believe Google will limit the number of hits you can have without paying a usage fee.

It would also be possible to create your own using the new RAVE engine, which is what MFGF may have been referring to. I just checked analyticszone.com and did not see an existing one. If anyone knows of such a beast I would not mind a look at it myself.