[Qgis-developer] Re: New Symbology ("discretized data"?)

[Mayeul Kauffmann]

Ramon Andinach wrote:

> I'd prefer "colormap", for the reason that you give.
seems ok for me.

> 
> With "categorized" and "graduated" I think that they are clear enough,
> but not what I would expect. If you were making a graph I was taught
> "discrete" and "continuous" to describe these data types, and that is
> what I'd expect.
I was taught this as well.

> The problem is categorized. Categorized data is data that's been
> grouped into subsets (bins). So even the "graduated" data becomes
> categorized. 
> (Take a set of numbers between 1 and 50 {1,2,11,13,22,24,33,35,44,46},
> which I treat as "graduated" data. I could then categorize them into 5
> groups of equal ranges {1,2}{11,13}{22,24}{33,35}{44,46} )

This process is called discretization (the words classification or
categorization are more general). See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discretization_of_continuous_features

Similar words are used in French (discrétisation), Italien
(discretizzazione), German (diskretisierung), Hungarian
(diskretizacija), Polish (dyskretyzacja)...

Hence "Discretized data" seems a good candidate to me. ("données
discrétisées" in French, the rest is left as an exercise for the
reader ;-) )
This is the standard way of calling this procedure (in the context of
map creation) in France, Switzerland and Québec. Based on some googling,
it seems that the term is used but not widespread in English. Compare a
search for

discrétisation carte

and one for 

discretization map

in google.
To have English results similar to French results, you need to search
for:

discretization map choropleth

With such a search, the term "discretization" seems to be appropriate
and very precise (still quite technical).

Still... "discretized data" is the result. When ou choose an entry in
the drop-down menu, the data are not discretized yet!
So another approach could be to name this entry "continuous data into
classes" or "classified continuous data" or a variant.
 

Mayeul