MapInfo Pro

I have a large amount of latitude and longitude points that create areas of interest around the UK.

Is there a way of inputting these into MapInfo Pro and creating Polygons, without having to manually 'join the dots'? There are so many points it would be impossible to know which ones join together.

I have thought of inputting each area of interest independently, creating points and inserting a polygon however this would be very time consuming.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

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Lucy
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Hi @Lucy Corboy​ - great spatial problem to get us thinking!

A couple of ideas to get started:
1. Convex Hull function in MapInfo Pro will create a polygon from a group of points (like stretching a rubber band around the outside)
2. Connect the Dots. This is a MBX (add-on) that is available from "Community Downloads" (look under "Pitney Bowes Sites" link in the menu at the top of this screen), this will provide the dot-to-dot feature. Uses the order of the objects in the table (this might be good or not so good depending on your data structure)

I'm sure there would be other ways to approach this type of a problem -  maybe other Community Members can share their thoughts too!

Thanks, Ashley

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Ashley Crane
Regional Director, Software Support
Pitney Bowes
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Lucy,

If the co-ords are grouped by an area identifier and in polygon node order you could 'possibly' look to creating a mid/mif file and then import them into Pro.

Export a polygon from an existing layer and open the .mif file in notepad.  Could you arrange your data to fit that specification?

Regards,

Nick

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Nick Hall
Mapchester LTD
nick.hall@mapchester.co.uk
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If these points represent "areas of interest" is this more about creating polygons around the points rather than connecting them? Voronoi is a very good way of doing this as it creates polygons where all locations in any polygon are closest to the original point than any other. However, it does not aggregate points by which I mean if many of these points are very close and represent something similar, they should be aggregated together before doing the process.
For example, if one town has 5 related landmarks and the next 3 are 20 miles away, it may not make sense to make 8 polygons. Maybe the 5 become one first!
Or as others have chimed in, if the points represent vertices of a polygon the problem is different.
Also any attribute data that groups them  together makes the problem much more manageable.

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Eric Blasenheim
Spectrum Spatial Technical Product Manager
Troy, NY
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