I need to know how I can take a scan of a blueprint of a building and create a map of "hot zones" where incidents are arising?

The reason I'm asking is because I'm trying to help a school. They have kept records of where students have reported bullying and other discipline incidents. I want to help them make a hot zone map of discipline incidents.

Hi,

Okay, for an interesting question, this one scores today's A+.

Do you have the plans for the building? If not, I'd draw something with a floor plan designer (sweet home 3d is ... pretty good, though there's better), and visualise the hotspots with some generic shape (a cilinder) and size it up according to the percentages.

But...these are some loose thoughts, never seen this kinda thing before...

Luck

Thor

And : thanks for helping limit the bad-highschool-experience and trying to turn it into the better-highschool-eperience

Erm, I wasn't planning on doing it in 3-D. We surveyed the students and asked about where problems were occurring at so that we'd know staff members and school resource officers need to spend more time monitoring these areas.

I've seen police maps of towns that show hot zones where they receive a large number of reports of crimes. They color code these maps with "cooler" parts of the town being blue, areas with moderate crime problems being somewhat purple, and "hot" areas with lots of crime being red. I might be able to do some of this in GIMP but I don't know how to incrementally blend colors like that.

I suspect that you will find some clues by researching "Geographic Information Systems" (GIS) software. While much of the emphasis tends to be on the macro level, I have seen cases where GIS techniques have been applied at a campus-size and building-size level. All kinds of data can be captured and displayed based on geographic parameters. Sorry I cannot be more specific than that.
Another research subject that might be revealing would be the concept of finding contour lines. From at least one perspective, this is at the heart of the visualization side of the problem. Assuming you have a database of some sort where 2-D coordinates identify 'incidents', possibly weighted in some way, and there is a method to sum the incidents so that adjacent incidents contribute to the sum according to geographical proximity, your 2D space will then become a sort of topographical map where there are contour lines that can be used to delineate 'hotness'. Finding these contour lines is part of the problem, and as I understand it, represents a somewhat classical computing problem, solvable in many ways. I think Gnuplot may have a canned solution for this. In any case, it is an extremely versatile plotting/graphing tool, and some of the sample applications that are distributed with it would suggest that it has a role in GIS-related visualization.

I would echo Thor_2.0's sentiment regarding the 'interesting-ness' factor of this thread.

--- rod.

2 members found this post helpful.

Thanks Rod, and indeed, my approach would not have yielded the required requslt...appologies to OP.

When I was a kid any time a bully pulled that stunt on me he got hit!

I am not too sure I won too many but the bullies never seemed to bother me again.

Direct yet justified action. Too few kids/people learn that sometimes it's justified to punch back. Good for you, dude!

Interesting. I've actually heard of geographic information systems. I know such software is used by politicians to draw constituencies. Computer enhanced gerrymandering as it were but I didn't know you could get that sort of thing for just buildings.

Does anyone know of any GIS software that would be good for this sort of thing? If it's open source or at least under a license that I could use it that'd be great. I mean, if I absolutely had too I could do something like this in GIMP but it wouldn't be nearly as nice. This is kind of a test project this school district is trying out on one school.