Hi,

i'm wondering if you could help me, my company recently purchased MapPoint 2006 and i want to highlight the boundries of local authorities/councils for England, Scotland and Wales.

i've had a look and noticed that i can highlight county and borough boundries but it misses quite alot of councils off

can anybody help me with this?

Stewart

Hi Stewart

Boundary data is available on a national basis for the Super Output Area (SOA) geography. These are available on a cd-rom from National Statistics in both .shp and MID/MIF formats (separately for Scotland and NI).

Super Output Areas (SOAs) - Other Geographies - Geography

I'm pretty sure (needs checking) that the SOA geography aggregates to local authorities. I think these files are in theory importable by MapPoint using the Spatial Data Import option on the Tools menu, but in my experience actually succeeding in doing this will be a fraught process. There's an issue about OSGRs for example.

How accurate do you need the boundaries?

Hope this helps, David

Hi David,

They don't need to be perfect i just need to be able to see the boundaries so i can highlight them depending on the what stage they are out to with our product.

i've done it by highlighting the council office post code with a push pin but it doesnt give the same effect for presentations etc.

Hi Stewart

To be honest I’d thought, ahead of reading your latest post, that if you’d just wanted to map penetration of a product then different coloured circles at the centroids of local authority areas would work pretty well. Clearly you’ve tried that using town hall addresses (nice thought that) but it doesn’t sound like it meets your needs. But remember there are a range of mapping forms you could try, and if you could come up with a good solution this way it would probably save a lot of hassle.

To get rough boundaries then I thought it may be possible to build territory maps based on postcode sectors that come as close as possible to the LA definitions. Postcode sectors don’t aggregate to LA boundaries so there will be approximation. I’ve tried to find a postcode sector to local authority lookup file but to no avail. I know that the OPCS allocate postcodes to OAs so it must be possible to develop a methodology.

Finally I think it would be possible to synthesise boundaries based on drawing mid-lines between OA centroids where LA areas were up against eachother. The difficult bit would be dealing with the coastline. If you did take this approach (or indeed use .shp boundary files) you’d end up with a collection of polygons that aren’t really part of the MapPoint geographies and effectively can only be used for colour filling (rendering a form shaded maps) and points-in-polygon queries.

David

Hi there

I did a bit of experimentation with approximating local authorities with postcode sectors and setting up a territory definition. I've put the result on my website (the brand new MapPoint Gallery section! - just access it via the menu). Based on Kent and a bit of Sussex, I think the results are perfectly acceptable for presentation purposes but the approximations are too great to be of much use for analytic work. For comparison here's an official map of Kent's local authorities

Kent Parishes and Town Councils

Rgds, David

hi david, i dont know if it just me being a bit dopey but i cant find the gallery! any chance of a link?

stewart

Here's the link

MapPoint Gallery