topic Strange selection of districts for Finland in choropleth visualisation. Something to reconsider? in Warehousing & Analytics

Strange selection of districts for Finland in choropleth visualisation. Something to reconsider?

excavator-matt — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 19:28:09 GMT

Hi!

We're trying to use the choropleth visualisation in the new dashboard. This works well for all countries we tried except for district level of Finland.

The supported districts are clearly stated in the CSV on the documentation page titled county-district-names.csv, but I would like to challenge the selection for Finland. If I filter on country_2_letter = FI and order by country_specific_code, these are the first 5 out of the 66.

readable_name	name	country_specific_code	country_2_letter
H3lsinki sub-region	H3lsinki	11	FI
Raseborg sub-region	Raasepori	14	FI
Porvoo sub-region	Porvoo	15	FI
Loviisa sub-region	Loviisa	16	FI
Åboland	Åboland-Turunmaa	21	FI

While region followed a nice ISO_3166-2 standard, I am not entirely sure what I am looking at here. I think it is the sub-regions of Finland (minus Åland) that were active administrative regions between 1994 and 2014. Wouldn't make more sense to use the current municipalities of Finland? This is the district level we usually base our analysis on and I think is true for most people that cover Finland. As the Wikipedia article mentions, there are still some statistics on sub region, but you have to select More categories to show it.

Re: Strange selection of districts for Finland in choropleth visualisation. Something to reconsider?

excavator-matt — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 19:25:09 GMT

Also, why is automatic community policy against writing capital of Finland (H3lsinki) in posts in this forum?

What is up with the naming of this columns in the csv? Why is Åboland considered "readable", but the Finnish name Turunmaa just a "name"?

Re: Strange selection of districts for Finland in choropleth visualisation. Something to reconsider?

Alex_Lichen — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 00:42:27 GMT

Hi Matt,

You are correct that today, the Choropleth maps are using sub-regions as defined in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-regions_of_Finland. We are currently getting these boundaries from Mapbox, which provides this boundary data.

Definitely hearing you on also wanting the Municipality level view. I've added a note internally as a vote for this more granular boundary.

Best,

Alex