Choropleth Map - Urban percentage

http://www.neiu.edu/~ejhowens/377/examples.htm

This choropleth map shows the state-by-state percentage of its population that is living within an urban area.  The areas with the lowest percentage include states in the south and also states that are located in the midwest.  States with the highest percentage are areas of the west and of the northeast.  This map is extremely interesting because it makes you think about what influences these percentages.  In the west, this makes sense because many areas are arid and the resources one might need to survive would only be in large urban areas. The northeast is a little trickier.  Maybe this is because these areas have some of the oldest cities in the nation and large populations naturally congregate within them.

DLG - Ottawa, Canada

https://www.lib.uwo.ca/madgic/geospatial/ottawa_data.htm

This map shows a section of Ottawa, Canada transformed into a vector and line form.  This map was more than likely made from either a remotely sensed image or from a land surveying project that was able to accurately gather data.  This information can be put into a GIS and used to maintain databases of relevant information.

Multivariate Map - Australia

http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgiSDEsktop/9.2/index.cfm?TopicName=Drawing_features_to_show_multiple_attributes

Multivariate maps are interesting because they can combine multiple map techniques into one.  For example, the map above is of Australia and depicts the ecoregions and the ecoregion disturbance level.  The ecoregions are depicted through the classed choropleth map and the disturbance level is shown through a proportional circle map.  Through this map we can see that the areas along the coast are the most disturbed and classified as "critical."  This area also coincides with the Montana grassland habitat type.

Flow map - Traffic Flow (Redmond Washington)http://redmondlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/09/redmond-traffic-cameras-and-traffic.html

http://redmondlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/09/redmond-traffic-cameras-and-traffic.html

The map above shows the traffic flow in Redmond, Washington, around 12 pm in the afternoon.  The green indicates areas that are free of congested traffic while the yellows and darker reds indicate areas that are relatively congested with traffic.  Maps like this are becoming more and more common for big cities.  Google maps now has the option to see traffic reports in this color scale form any time during the day.  Looking at this flow of "goods" can save you A LOT of time when you are travelling!

Cartogram - HIV Aids

http://www.spirituality.org.za/2009/08/please-dont-click-this-link.html

The above cartogram shows the HIV AIDs statistics in a slightly different light.  This map bases the depicted area of the countries on how large their percentages are in relation to each other.  Therefore, the countries with the largest percentage of HIV among its people have the largest area, the countries with the smallest percentage are depicted smaller.  From this map we can again see that portions of Africa have the highest rates of HIV in the world.  In relation to these areas with large rates, we can use South America (which is roughly the same size as Africa on a normal map.  South America in this map is SIGNIFICANTLY smaller than Africa, showing that its HIV rates are much smaller as well.

Lorenz Curve - South African household income

http://www.sarpn.org.za/documents/d0000990/

The lorenz curve is often used to show the distribution of income among households.  The percentage of households is printed on the y-axis and the percentage of income obtained is printed on the x-axis.  The blue line that moves diagonally through the graph is called the "line of perfect equality" and represents what the graph would look like if all of the wealth was equally distributed among the population.  The lorenz curve shows the deviation from this equality.  The bigger the area is between the "perfect equality" line and the lorenz curve is, the greater amount of inequality exists.

Correlation Matrix - Tissue to tissue

http://www.livestockgenomics.csiro.au/Genome_to_Phenome/

A correlation matrix is matrix that compares how to values are related to each other.  Correlation can range from values of -1.0 to 1.0, with -1.0 values corresponding to blue and 1.0 values corresponding to red.  When put into a matrix, the chart above becomes apparent.  If you look at the two axes on this chart, the tissues which we are comparing are in the same order.  Therefore, the diagonal line that is going from one corner to the other (the continuous red pixels) occurs because this correlation matrix is comparing one tissue value to the same tissue.  All other lines that appear can also reveal information about the correlation between tissues.