Click here to see the SAS code.
Click here to see the example.

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Note:
This is a very old example, where I screen-captured a Google satellite map,
and then worked out the lat/long for the corners, and annotated the house
data onto that coordinate system.
More recently, I have come up with better ways do do this sort of thing,
without so much manual process.

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This is a real-life example of SAS/Graph at work! ...


A developer is wanting to develop the land in my back yard (literally),
and build one 7-story building (with 2 floors of underground parking),
and a dozen 4-story condos (with 1 floor of underground parking).
He would need to get the land rezoned for "high-density" to be 
allowed to build this, so us neighbors had an opportunity to protest.
Here's some info about the company:
801-MAYNARD-LLC.html

I wanted to create a map that would help us identify which neighbors
were most-affected, and to graphically show where these proposed 
buildings were to be located (the developer had only given handouts
which showed lot boundaries, but didn't show our house addresses, and
didn't show where our houses were located on the lots, etc - just
rough outlines of lot boundaries on black/white paper).

Therefore I looked up the satellite image of this area using the
Google Earth maps (this map shows the locations of our houses),
and I used a drawing package to add the proposed buildings (in 
yellow), and I then used SAS/Graph to annotate red stars on each
house - you can hover your mouse over the red stars to see the
street address in a charttip, and click on the red star to do a 
lookup in the Wake County tax database to find the owner for 
that particular property.  This makes it very easy to see exactly
who is affected, and exactly what is being built close to who's 
house, etc.

There were a lot of manual steps in this process, but I think the
end-result turned out pretty good :-)

Details:

I looked up the area on maps.google.com, and did a screen-capture
of the satellite image of the area-of-interest.

I then viewed the same area in Google Earth, and used the interactive
mouse pointer to find the lat/long coordinates of the corners of the
area I had screen-captured.  I used these 4 coordinates as the x/y of
a SAS/Graph map area (just a simple map containing 1 rectangle).

I then annotate the screen-capture into this map area, using xsys/ysys='2'
(data coordinate system) so that the screen-capture image is "registered"
with the simple rectangle map.

I then find the lat/long of each house (using Google Earth's mouse pointer
again), and enter that into a data set, and I annotate red stars at those
locations.

(Note that this technique assumes you're working with a small enough map area 
that it is rectangular shaped, and not wedge-shaped such as large areas 
near the north/south pole might be.)

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