Saturday, May 10, 2014

Mapping the Center of Your Universe


Andy Dickinson has created a Google Map that shows the center of every district authority in Great Britain.

The map displays the centroid for each district. Thanks to its use of Google Maps you can even use the satellite map view and Street View to have a closer look at the center of each district ('the centroid is ... the point at which a cardboard cut-out of the region could be perfectly balanced on the tip of a pencil, assuming uniform density and a uniform gravitational field).

To create the map Andy used Office of National Statistics boundary data for each district authority and QGIS to calculate the centroids. His blog post Finding and Mapping the Center of Your World(ish) goes into more detail on how he created his final map. A Fusion Table generated map of all the Great Britain district authority centroids is also embedded within the post.

Now you know how it's done why not have a go at mapping the geographical center of your own immediate world?

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