Creation of TopoJSON maps of Colombian departments and towns from GeoJSON and Esri files

 

This data science and visualization project creates TopoJSON maps of Colombian departments and towns from corresponding GeoJSON and Esri files, improving the visualization of specific territories.

 

One day I was working with a Power BI dashboard (shared with me by a colleague, who got the dashboard from one of her colleagues, and so on) to visualize several stats related to Colombian departments. The dashboard had a shape map of Colombian departments. I was curious and wanted to learn about this particular map. I couldn't track down the dashboard's original author nor I could extract the source file of the map from the Power BI file.

 

I thus started this project to create my own shape maps. The starting point was a TopoJSON map of Colombian towns I found on Internet. The map was correct, but it wasn't that appealing for visualization purposes since some specific territories were pretty small and far from mainland. Colombian maps one commonly sees in official reports have these territories scaled and closer to mainland.

 

The main work of this project revolves around modifying the geometries from offical GeoJSON and Esri files of Colombian departments and towns to make those territories more visually appealing. Once the geometries are modified, the updated files are converted to TopoJSON maps that can be used in Power BI.

 

Details about the implementation and the results can be found in the project’s repo.