SSRS R2 Map – What Happened to Michigan?

I am not a geography or map expert and that is most likely why I did not pickup on this when I did my previous postings on the new Map report item in Reporting Services 2008 R2, but yesterday I noticed that Lake Superior was not being represented on the map

Does something look a bit odd?  The rest of the states look pretty good.  So why does this not look like what I am used to seeing?

So I thought this was a bug with the map of the entire USA.  I go down to the individual states and this is the shape for Michigan

Hmmm… What is that?  I thought Michigan looked like the following

If you look at Bing and Goolge maps you will see the outline polygon shapes and it does align with what is setup with the map in SSRS

Bing

Google

And you will notice that the shapes of Minnesota and Wisconsin are a tad bit different as well and this is also represented in the SSRS map.

I go ahead and pull down the spatial data for the states (for the steps on how to do this check out Sean Boon’s (Blog | Twitter) response in the forums here – How do I do this? R2 Map Feature) and create a map using the spatial data and here is what we get

Seems really odd to me.  It does not appear to be a bug because it is used this way.  Really confusing to me though and not sure what the reasoning is for this representation.  There is a connect bug for this, but as I stated it seems like it is correct – SSRS 2008 R2 USA By State – Michigan has incorrect shape.  So what do you think?  Anyone know why this is?

I did find this little blurb here and maybe this is the answer, not sure:

In addition to a common database structure, the conterminous U.S. state databases (the contiguous 48 states) have been fitted to a set of standard state boundaries so that, when states are merged, they match without slivers or overlap. No attempt has been made to reconcile differences in mapping across state boundaries.

Just kind of odd to me, but I guess this is what we have to work with.  The shapefiles for  Alaska and Hawaii are accurate – would be odd if they were not and just got merged like the rest of the 48.

UPDATE (10/17/2010): I went ahead and loaded the spatial data for Michigan for the counties and zip 5 data and I ended up with these results.  One actually provides the results we would expect to see

County representation:

Zip 5 representation:

Interesting.  State and county polygon data do not provide the layout we would expect, but referencing the zip codes does provide a familiar view of Michigan.

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