Map Settings

Map Settings is where a space grows beyond one map. It lists the views that already exist, creates new ones, and links maps together so a selection made on one appears on the other.

Where to find it

View > Exploration > Map Settings. It needs a loaded map; without one it just reads “No map loaded.” The panel has two tabs, Views and Refine.

Note

This panel does not control 2D or 2.5D. That toggle lives on the map itself, in the floating View control on the default Map and in the right-hand toolbox on Map (Legacy).

Views

The list at the top shows every view of the current map. The semantic view, the embedding-based one you normally look at, is pinned first and tinted. A view built from an embedding is tagged embedding, and a view that is linked to another map carries a ⟷ marker.

• Click a view to open it. Selecting the semantic view focuses the existing Map tab; any other view opens as its own tab, pinned to that view.
• The x deletes a view. It is only offered on views you created, never on the semantic view or on system views.

Creating a map

The middle of the Views tab builds a whole new map of the same data from a different set of fields.

1. Choose fields. Tick the fields to embed. Each ticked field gets a weight slider from 0.1 to 2.0, so you can make one field count for more than another.
2. Choose an embedding mode. Concatenate text joins the chosen fields into one string before embedding. Separate embeddings embeds each field and combines the vectors using your weights.
3. Name it, or leave the name blank to get one derived from the first fields you picked.
4. Optionally skip clustering for a faster result. You get positions without cluster labels or boundaries.
5. Click Create Map. The button reads Create Map (Concatenate) or Create Map (Composite) depending on the mode. The request goes to the backend and the map is built in the background; the panel confirms with the new map’s id.

Direct projection

Direct Projection is the cheap alternative: instead of embedding anything, it plots two existing columns against each other. Pick an X Axis and a Y Axis from Embedding X, Embedding Y and the space’s numeric columns, then pick a Backdrop:

• Auto-detect chooses geo tiles when the two fields look like coordinates, no backdrop when either axis is an embedding axis, and a grid otherwise.
• Grid, Geo Tiles or None force the choice.

Choosing Geo Tiles adds a Tile Provider list: Carto Light, Carto Dark, Carto Voyager, OpenStreetMap, Satellite or Terrain.

Create Projection builds the view in the browser and opens it as a tab straight away. Nothing is sent to the backend, and tile backdrops are drawn by the legacy scene.

Linking maps

Link Maps appears once the space has more than one map, with a switch per other map. Turn a switch on and the two maps sync in both directions:

• Selecting points on one map selects the matching points on the other.
• Clearing the selection clears it on the other.
• A bag created or changed on one map is copied to the other, named with a ⟷ prefix so you can tell a synced copy from an original.

Points are matched by their source data row, not by position, so linking works between two maps built from different fields of the same dataset. A point with no counterpart in the other map is simply dropped from the synced selection.

Refine

The Refine tab holds Refine Space, which re-runs one phase of space creation on the current space: embedding, reduction, clustering, cluster labeling or point re-titling. Maps imported from an H5AD source are read-only here, and the tab tells you to create a derived map first.

Limits

• Creating a map is asynchronous. The panel confirms that the job started, not that the map is ready.
• Views created by Direct Projection live in the browser, and they are not backend objects.

Read nextMapWhere the views you create here end up.