What do you do when you want to take a look at a large set of delivery address data to assess density, volume and spread? (And you don't want to spend too much time and money doing so.) The obvious first thought it to map it using Google.
It’s free, easy to use and the pins can be adapted to represent the volume of deliveries. And if you don’t want to code, you can use an excellent online service like GPS Visualizer (www.gpsvisualizer.com).
The problem is that a pin-based solution becomes too cluttered after the first couple of hundred addresses and no use at all if you have hundreds of thousands of addresses or want to get a quick overview of an entire region or state without drilling too far down to the street level.
One mapping techniques that can be used to represent density effectively is known as a Heat Map. A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the values taken by a variable in a two-dimensional map are represented as colors. The following example shows several hundred thousand delivery addresses visualized as a heat map.
Using this technique it is very easy to identify areas of heavy density. (See: http://www.heatmapapi.com/ for a free Google-based API that produces similar style visualizations).
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