Merkador

Maps are becoming ever more present on the internet and Google Earth is the exponent of the emerging geoweb. Its free availability, large user base and lots of features and capabilities make it an excellent tool for a wide range of applications. The list of sectors already using and benfiting from Google Earth is long: education, tourism, marketing, photography, government, non profit, ...

Almost any data with a geospatial dimension can be visualized in Google Earth. Merkador offers advice and support on gathering, preparing, layouting and publishing your data in Google Earth. Merkador can also help you to integrate geodata and maps in your website and to put the web 2.0 to work to meet your goals.

Check out the video introduction and the gallery below to see some of examples of how Google Earth can be used to visualize different types of data.

Gallery

Train schedule animation When I saw the Ebb and Flow of Melbourne Trains by Flink Labs, it sprang to my mind that producing a similar animation in Google Earth could be done pretty easily using Google Earth's time slider. I made this animation for the trains going to and coming from the station of Leuven, the city where I daily commute to by train.	The Belgian music festivals 2009 View in Google Earth Last year Merkador published the geocalendar of the Belgian music festivals 2008. With the start of the new festival season, a version for 2009 was due.
National Geographic Photography View in Google Earth Since not all users are familiar with the posibilities of the Google Earth user interface, I wanted to create some content with very minimalistic controls. I love travelling, strange places and photography, so I ended up geolocating images from National Geographic Photography.	Family names A long time ago someone pointed me to a website that could generate a map with the number of people sharing your last name and the places where they live in Belgium. This website was familienaam.be and although I liked the website a lot, it was kind of a pity that you couldn't see the exact locations where these people with the same name as yourself where living (becaus of the low resolution and the lack of placenames on the maps).
Population Belgian municipalities View in Google Earth The Thematic Mapping Blog inspired me to experiment a little with the visualization of statistics with 3D-symbols. On the Statbel website I found the population numbers of all Belgian municipalities. Statbel made everything a little more easy by providing geographic coordinates of the municipalities, with a precision of '2.000 meter from the townhouse'.	Geo Fogonazos View in Google Earth Fogonazos is a very good spanish blog about amazing things in the world. A lot of the articles are linked to a geographic location and I thought it would interesting to visualize these locations on a map.
Premier League players origin View in Google Earth Modern football is very international: every season players move from one country to another and on the clubs payrolls appaer players from all over the world. This is especially so in the English Premier League, the competition with the richest clubs in the world. This content overlay shows the origin of the first team players of the 4 biggest clubs: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United.	AIDS prevelance rates View in Google Earth More and more international institutions are opening up there statistics databases and publish them online. Most of these statistics have a geographical component and Google Earth is a perfect tool to visualize these statistics.