Eat Globally, Locally in Chicago – Revisited

A while back, I had undertaken a little project to determine how many country’s restaurants were represented in the Chicagoland area. This was one of the earliest projects I used that leveraged location and GIS information, and I thought I would revisit it with a more updated knowledge of GIS tools. The first pass at this was using some of the spatial capabilities in R , and  it produced what I had hoped to at the time.  Then,  I was really looking for a sort of ‘at a glance’ view, without providing too much detail.

Now I’d like to use a new approach to eventually produce an interactive web map. The approach here will be to showcase some different  components:

1.  Use PostgreSQL to store and process data on countries and the restaurants representing them in Chicago.
2. Use QGIS to produce the map locally.
3. Use the QGIS2Web plug in to produce javascript to be incorporated into a website.
4. Incorporate the code to present an interactive map on a website.

I will add further details of some of the technical details involved in this later. For now, let’s see the results.

Here is the newly updated map, hosted on a Django website. This map is interactive; clicking on a green colored country will indicate the restaurant in Chicago associated with that country. White colored countries do not have restaurants represented in Chicago.

Also, keep in mind that this is mainly an updating of the technology and not necessarily the content. I notice several of the restaurants have closed since the initial listing. I may update at some point, but if anyone wants to point out any changes, please let me know here.

You can also see the map below directly here.