Download a California counties shapefile

To generate a choropleth map in Splunk Web, you need a geographic feature collection file, also known as a shapefile or Keyhole Markup Language/Keyhole Markup Zipped (KML/KMZ) file, that provides geographic boundaries that match the spatial granularity of your data. This tutorial uses county-level drought data in California, so you need a feature collection that divides California into counties. You can download this file from the CA.gov California Open Data Portal.

Most US, city, and state-level government websites have Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) data portals where you can download geographic reference maps. Other sites with useful geographic reference maps include the US Census Bureau Cartographic Boundary Files site and the USGS The National Map Data Download site.

Prerequisites

• Locate and download USDM data
• Upload and configure your data

Steps

Follow these steps to download the appropriate geographic feature collection. Alternatively, download the ca_counties.kmz.zip file directly.

1. Navigate to the Datasets page of the California Open Data Portal.
2. Locate the .kmz file of California county boundaries using one of the two following approaches:
1. Enter California Counties in the search bar.
2. Narrow your search using the following selections:

   Field in Dataset Search page	Values
   Topics	Economy and Demographics
   Format	kml

3. Select the file entitled California Counties and download the .kmz file.
4. Rename the downloaded file to ca_counties.kmz.

Next step

Create a new geospatial lookup