Themathic map/choropleth map of the Netherlands

Question

I have a bunch of data on Dutch individuals that I would like to visualize with a choropleth map. I also have the location of the individuals (longitude and latitude), so I was hoping that it would be possible to visualize that on a Dutch map that is divided into municipalities (="gemeente" in Dutch), so I can color each municipality according to the mean value of all individuals living there. I know that the R package maptools can make choropleth maps, but I believe that it requires template maps in the form of a .shp file. Does anyone know where I could find such a template for the Netherlands? Preferably with municipalities and NOT per province, so for this image it would be the one on the left:

_{(source: www.kb.nl)}

Any suggestions for other packages/software/etc to do this are also welcome! Many thanks!

Answer 1

also try GADM: http://www.gadm.org/ This site is an excellent resource, extra bonus: .Rdata is one of the formats you can download in (containing a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame). They also have .shp format, for your case.

Answer 2

Your main problem will be finding a shapefile for the municipalities. Once you have that and can easily relate your data at the lat/long level to the municipalities, then plotting becomes easy.

• ggplot2 is a fantastic example.

• Choropleths in R is a potential example, because it does not use shapefiles, but I believe the maps package supports it

• Failing that, you could always try Weave