Creating shaded zip code maps (newbie)

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Steve,

Bill Binko's advice is good. I also just did this using PostGIS and it
was very straight forward. Setting up PostGIS is pretty easy, but learn
Postgres was a little tricky with only a MySQL background, but it all
came together. I used the Census zcta5 polygons and loaded them into
PostGIS all my other reference data was in shapefiles and mapserver
handled it all with easy.

Other have done similar things using MySQL, and/or GDAL, but I think
PostGIS is worth the extra effort to learn it and set it up as it has
lots of other cool features and is a more scalable solution. I'm joining
the polygons with Census Summary File information and data similar to ad
impressions. http://imaptools.com/test/postgis-maps.php

-Steve W.

Steve Gertz wrote:
> All,
>
> This is my first time dipping my toe into the GIS world, after a couple
> of years of working on problems that dealt with geography.  I'm finally
> getting the chance to visualize our data.
>
> I'm tring to create a highlighted view zip codes, based on the number of
> ad impressions we have for each zip code.  I'd want to do some number
> crunching and shade each zip code (or other geographical shape) between
> white and some solid (with gray for no data).
>
> I've got the 5 digit Zip code tablulation areas from the census.  From
> there things get more tricky.  I think I want a raster image for each
> scale of the map, but I can't find any interfaces that allow making the
> raster files easy in perl.  I can't seem to find anything that will link
> the raster and geographic data together.
>
> Does anyone have advice for solving this type of problem?  Seems this
> would be a great FAQ to add to the mapserver / gdal / grass / et al
> websites.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Steve
>