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Thematic Maps use a theme to visualise the data stored in a table. Themes represent data with shades
of colour; fill patterns, symbols, grids or charts. They have several advantages:
1. They can be used to visualise complex statistical data,
2. They are quicker to apply than splitting a table and changing the style of each part manually
3. They dont disrupt the table
Planning a thematic map
It is important to understand the elements that comprise a thematic map.
4. Thematic Variables This is the data to be displayed (e.g. housing numbers, soil type)
5. Thematic Types:
6. Ranges Data is grouped into ranges (e.g. population <10m, 10-19m etc). This is commonly used
with a region (e.g. population per country) fill but it could be applied to line or point styles (e.g. to
show the period a utility was laid in 1800-1899, 1900-1949 etc)
7. Graduated Symbols vary in size according to value. An example might be the population of a city on
a world map.
8. Dot Density: Use dots to represent the data value associated with a boundary or region. The total
number of dots in a region represents that regions data value. If you have 10,000 senior citizens in
a county, and each dot represents 100 senior citizens, there would be 100 dots in the county
boundary.
9. Grid A grid surface theme is a continuous raster grid produced by an interpolation of point data..
Grid mapping displays data as continuous colour gradations across the map. This is produced by
an interpolation of point data from the source table. A grid file is generated from the data
interpolation and displayed as a raster image. This is commonly used for elevation and flood data.
10. Individual Values. The region, line or symbol style can be set to specific values in the source table.
An example is soil types, parish names.
11. Bar Chart and Pie Chart
Applying a thematic: 1 Individual Region Style
I am going to apply an Individual Region Style thematic to the British Geological Society supplied mineral
map below:
Creating Thematic Maps in MapInfo
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From the menu, select Map, Create Thematic Map
In the dialogue box, select Individual on the left bar, and Region Indv Value from the list inside the box
Now select the source table and field. In this case the table is Minerals and the field is Description.
Press next. The styles and legend box appears:
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Select the desired style for each individual value.
When complete, press Ok. Now Press the Legend button to edit how each item will appear in the legend:
Items that dont need to be shown in the legend can be hidden by unticking the Show This Range box.
This is useful when one style has been applied to several different items. Eg. If Chalk, Sand and Clay are
being grouped together as Soft Rock., the same style should be applied to all three. However, having
three separate Soft Rock entries in the legend would look very untidy. Therefore, the Show this Range
box should be ticked for one Soft Rock entry but unticked for the remaining two.
Press Ok to close the customize legend box, and press ok to close the Create Thematic Map dialogue
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box.
The new thematic will now appear in the Map Window. The thematic is controlled via a new entry in the
layers panel.
Range based region Style
The following example uses the amount of retail floor space per parish in Wokingham.
1. A query is needed to update the Parish boundary table (clear polygon with red lines) with the amount
of retail floor space which is detailed in the table LandUse_Classes (the small black polygons shown
within each parish).
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12. A query is needed to update the Parish boundary table with the retail floor space. MapInfo can
update columns based on calculations of data in other tables.
13. Select Table, Update Column. The table to update is Parish Boundaries; the column to update is
Retail_sq_m.
14. Select Land Use Classes in the get value from box. The join between the two tables will need to be
specified, as the update is based on data from the other table.
15. Press the join button. In this case the join is where the object from Land Use classes is within the
Parish boundaries. The other spatial option is where an object contains the other one. You can also
join based on data attributes, for example where the County column of a shops address matched
the name column of a table of county boundaries.
You can see how the column has updated:-
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Applying the thematic
Select Map, create Thematic Map
In the dialogue box, select Region Ranges Solid Fill
In the next box (Step 2 of 3) select the table and field the thematic will be based on.
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Step 3 of 3 gives the options to customise the thematic:
Press Ranges to customise the ranges that each colour shade will represent:
Press Styles to customise the style for each range.
Clicking the box in the lower right corner of the colour grid allows custom colours to be entered by their
RGB or Hue, Saturation values:
Back on the Modify thematic map dialogue box, press the Legend button to enter the Customise Legend
text box.
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When satisfied with the thematic map, press ok on all open dialogue boxes to close them. The thematic
will be displayed:-
It is possible to save Thematic Templates. In the Modify Thematic Map dialogue box, press the Template
Save As button. The template file is saved as a .thm file in the Documents and Settings\username?
\Application Data\MapInfo\Professional\version?\ ThmTmplt. To re-use a template, press the merge
button in the Modify Thematic Map dialogue box.
Labels
I would like to label each parish with its name and the amount of retail floorpace.
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Right click on the Parish Boundaries layer, and select Layer Properties
Select the Label Display tab.
Select Label With pull down and select expression, as we are combing two columns plus some
formatting commands.
In the expression box, enter the following: Feature_Name+Chr$(13)+Format$(Retail_sq_m, 0.00)
Select the font, label position and press ok.
Click the label tag on the far right of the Parish Boundaries in the Layer Control panel
Lets examine the labelling expression: Feature_Name+Chr$(13)+Format$(Retail_sq_m, 0.00)
Feature_Name is the first column to be used for the label
Char$(13). Char$() enters a special character. Char$(13) enters a line break
Format$(Retail_sq_m, 0.00) Format$() formats the label string that is enclosed in its brackets. In
this case Format$(Retail_sq_m, 0.00) adds the Retail_sq_m column but formats it to 2 decimal
places.
To achieve this label without an expression, I would have needed to have 2 copies of the parish
boundary table (one to be labelled with the name, another to be labelled with the retail floor space. Plus,
I would have needed to have added an extra column with the retail floor space formatted to decimal
places.