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earlowens
Contributor II
Contributor II

Sense 3.1 Automatic Geographical Data Issue

I love the new feature in 3.1 for automatic recognition of city and country names for easy mapping.  However, I noticed a huge issue for city names that exist in multiple states (i.e. Portland, Charleston, Springfield, etc.).

I created a test import with three organizations all with a city of Portland, but different states (OR, IN, and ME).  When I set up the city and country fields as Geo data and drop them into a map, they all three get graphed in Portland OR.  Even if I filter to the State = IN, the data point still shows in OR.

Is this just a known limitation of the software, or am I missing some critical step?  There is no place that I see to identify the state or postal code or other field for it to recognize where to plot that city name. Our database does not contain other geographic data such as Latitude/Longitude, so I was excited for this update - but this issue makes the data blatantly wrong and misleading.

Anyone else notice this or have a workaround?  Thanks!

7 Replies
Patric_Nordstrom
Employee
Employee

Hi Earl,

City names are ambiguous, so please help the lookup by adding more information

=city & ',' & state_abbr & ',US'

Here's a link to the tech doc:

Location Services

There's a nice video also about this topic:

Qlik GeoAnalytics - Troubleshooting a location lookup

Thanks,

Patric Nordström

Qlik

earlowens
Contributor II
Contributor II
Author

Hi Patric,

Thank you for the quick response.  I tested this again, but this time using a City,State,Country key as you suggested.  I tried this in multiple formats, but in every case the map failed to plot any values when using that field as the point layer, even though I had labeled it as GeoData and tagged it as City (which is the only option other than Country).  I hope I was clear in that, this is just the base 3.1 SR5 Sense installation and I'm using the standard Map visualization.  We have not yet invested in GeoAnalytics which represents the Qlik acquisition of Idevio, which seems to be what is referenced in the video you linked to in your response.  So, am I just getting ahead of myself in trying to accomplish this?

Thanks,

Earl

Anonymous
Not applicable

Hi Patric , how to deal with city name issue in Qlik GeoAnalytics as the following? Thanks!

Saint Louis, Saint-Louis or St. Louis



Patric_Nordstrom
Employee
Employee

Sorry, I was referring to Qlik GeoAnalytics not the standard map object.

So, yes, you need Qlik GeoAnalytics to do what you want.

Patric_Nordstrom
Employee
Employee

Hi Haikuo,

Miss-matches will happen, city names are ambiguous and can be spelled in different ways.

QGA includes alias for many cities but not all them.

1. Correct the city name at the source (not always possible)

2. Layer properties->Location Options->Manual Remap (if just a few errors)

3. Create a translation table that holds the different spellings.

psublue98
Creator
Creator

Relying on spelling or qualitative text is fraught with issues. A better long-term solution is if the QGA uses FIPS codes for US states and counties.

Patric_Nordstrom
Employee
Employee

Yes, fyi QGA also recognizes country, state and county codes for many administrative boundaries.

For more information check the technical documentation. Location Services

In US, the state abbreviation is the code and for counties the three digit FIPS code.

Patric