I want to create some heat-map style tiles to overlay over our base maps using Open Layers. Basically, I want to divide some some bounding box into a grid, and display each square of the grid using a different color based on how many points of a sample fall within that grid square.
The technologies involved are C#, OpenLayers, SQL Server 2008 and GeoServer.
My question is basically one of general approach, I'm not really sure where to put the tip of the chisel on this one.
My ultimate goal is to be able to take any arbitrary bounding box, calculate an x-mile by x-mile grid that fits within that bounding box, the iterate over a collection of individual points and assign them to one grid square or another so I can calculate point density per grid square, then color the grid according to the densities, then overlay that on a CloudMade base map using Open Layers.
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated, on the whole thing or any piece of it.