Google Maps has become the most popular global map in the last few decades. The existence of google maps is one of the keys for several modes of transportation to develop rapidly. Various existing features and APIs make it easier for anyone to process and obtain data quickly and thoroughly. Recently Google Maps released a new feature called data driven style feature. What is a data driven feature? keep reading this article

Data display via Google Maps helps you communicate important information to users visually and intuitively. One way is to use polygons to highlight specific regions and data. As is well known, Google already has a lot of data from people worldwide and can map it so that it is neatly organized and easy to digest visually. This data can certainly be used as a business development resource. Let’s discuss the new Data-Driven Style from Google Maps Platform.

One of Google’s most frequently asked features is access restrictions and the polygons used in Google Maps to create informative and attractive maps for your customers.

For this reason, Google Maps announced the release of a Data-Driven Style preview for the Maps JavaScript API so that you can display your data on Google Maps more attractive and informatively.

What is Data driven styling?

Data driven styling is a new feature of Google Maps that allows you to style Google Maps to visually convey important information to users, using proprietary data (e.g., store inventory) or publicly available data (e.g., election or voting results).

Using data-driven styling, Google Maps makes it easier to display Google polygons for administrative boundaries or refine your business data within Google administrative boundaries to form polygon styles or choropleth maps according to your business needs. This will make it possible for users to get a visually appealing view of the data, give users additional context in the area they want, help them make decisions quickly, and save time for pulling data to make decisions.

The Data-Driven Style provides the identical polygons as you would see on a typical Google Maps. However, there is a significant difference: Google allows access to additional administrative boundaries such as locality, postal code, and others to give access to country borders and specific countries. In addition, Google will manage your data, and you no longer need to buy, update and maintain data limits yourself.

Case Study Data Driven Style

The data-driven style can be used in various cases that utilize data in multiple industries, including real estate, travel, media, government, education, and many more. With Google Maps, you can define your own data display and polygons for your specific data.

To help users visualize easily if a listing is in the desired area, you can provide context for a home, hotel, or shop search by displaying a polygon for the locality or postal code they’re looking for.

It also lets you create choropleth maps for administrative boundary types, using Google boundary data and your own or sourced tabular business data. For example, multiple country styles, level 1 administrative areas, localities, or postal code limits by COVID-19 cases, house prices, or election results.

Data-driven styles also provide support for an interactive user experience. For example, clicking a polygon on your map returns metadata to your app, including the Place ID, feature type, and display name of the clicked polygon. This event is useful for experiences where you want to rearrange the map based on user interaction.

Using Data Driven Style

To enable data-driven styling, select the feature layer you want to allow for new or existing Map Styles in the Google Cloud Console and associate that style with a Map ID with vector maps for JavaScript enabled. Data-driven styling is not supported for Static Maps or raster tiles in JavaScript.

You’ll find the feature layer dropdown in the settings for your Map Styles over the coming days.

Then apply a FeatureStyleOptions or FeatureStyleFunction object to the feature layer in your code. You can adjust the fill and stroke color, fill and stroke opacity, and stroke weight for each feature layer.

For preview releases, Data-driven styles provide access to feature types for administrative areas including country, locality, postal code, and more.

Visit our coverage table in the documentation to see supported countries and available feature types. We will continue to roll out additional coverage during the preview phase. If there’s a specific country and type of feature you’d like to add, please provide your feedback via our Issue Tracker.

Setting polygons using Place ID

A common use case for data-driven styling is for styling individual polygons or a subset of polygons within a feature type, such as a restricted set of countries or localities. The best way to do this is to reference those limits using their Place ID, which we allow you to cache indefinitely.

To make it easier to retrieve the Place ID for each region, we provide a region lookup utility that gives you the option to provide geographic coordinates, address, place name, ISO Code or FIPS code and return the Region Place ID available at that location. This utility is an open source library for JavaScript available in our Google Maps repository on GitHub. Alternatively, you can use Geocoding, Place Search, or Autocomplete to retrieve the Place ID for a region.

Use of Data Driven Style

This Data Driven style is based on the dynamic maps for maps javascript API. developers can use data driven style based on data and other cloud based features fo
r Dynamic Maps to create mapid configured javascript vector maps in google cloud console. In the future, Google Maps hopes to introduce other additional features to extend the data driven style to help you to form data visualizations that are more tailored to your needs and become the most enjoyable interactive experience for your users and take advantage of the unique data you have.