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Now the FIFA World Cup 2010 is nearing its finale, Merkador presents a Google Earth content layer that shows the location of the clubs where every of the 736 players who participated in the tournament is playing.
Every country is represented by the country border outline and an icon with the country flag. Clicking the country icon will open a balloon with the squad list of the country. For every player a link is provided to take you to the stadium of the club the player is affiliated with. Lines connecting the country to the clubs of the members of the countries national team are also provided.
Hovering over the icon of a club (the black and white circles) will show its name and clicking it will open up a balloon containing the nationality and names of the clubs players present in the World Cup. Clicking a countries flag icon in the club balloons will give you the squad list of the country. The file also contains some user guidelines. Data sources:
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It is turning into a yearly habit: a calendar of the Belgian summer festivals in Google Earth!
Test it below (the Google Earth plugin needs to be installed, click here to open the calendar in Google Earth) |
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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. I scraped the time schedule data from the National Company of Belgian Trainways (NMBS) website. Hopefully someday they will provide their data in a more convenient way like Google's Transit Feed, for now only scraping was possible. You can see the result in the following video:
I plan to add another video showing different view points in Google Earth and to develop an animation for another station, probably Antwerp Central Station. |
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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.
The following Prezi illustrates the posibilities (use the little arrows in the lower right corner to browse through the presentation).
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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.
The content layer contains 8 sets of thumbnails, organised in a tabbed menu. You can fly to the location where a photo was taken by clicking a thumbnail or the photo title. A balloon containing a larger version of the photo opens up (clicking this photo takes you to the photo in the National Geographic gallery in your browser) and arrow buttons give you the possibility to fly to the previous or next image or return to the gallery menu. You may have to zoom out a little to get a better view in areas with low res imagery and not all locations were determined very exactly.
Finding the photo locations was sometimes hard, sometimes easy but always fun. I used a variety of tools: Locator Firefox plugin, Capture Coordinates in GE tool and the Position Finder mapplet.
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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).
To overcome this problem and in order to bring a little interactivity into Merkador, I decided to bring familienaam.be to Google Earth. In the same move I did the same with familienaam.nl, which shows you the occurrence of a surname for the Dutch territory. With the search boxes below, you can see where and how many times your surname occurs in Belgium and the Netherlands. Keep in mind that the used statistics date from 1998 for Belgium and from 1993 for the Netherlands.
Tip: make sure the 'Borders and labels' layer is checked in the Google Earth side bar. If the layer is checked, the placenames appaer when you zoom in. |
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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'.
Every municipality is represented by a cone which height is proportional to the municipalities population. To avoid screen clutter, only the names of the most populous municipalities are shown when zoomed out. Zooming in causes the names of less populous municipalities to show. In the table of content the municipalities are organised by province and are ordered by population.
Every municipality is also represented by an icon which, when clicked, opens a balloon that contains the exact total population (2006), the place of the municipality on the national ranking and a graph that shows the number of inhabitants with Belgian nationality and with other nationality. |
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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. Click the little arrows in the balloons to move from one place to another and click on the balloon titles to read the original article on Fogonazos. Try switching to the satellite or hybrid view (in the lower left corner of the map). To make things clear: I didn't use a single line of code to generate the map. You don't have to be a programmer anymore to do some amazing things online with data and maps. I used Zoho Creator and Yahoo Pipes to create a geoRSS and put everyting on a map. Antonio, the author of Fogonazos, put the Geo Fogonazos map on his terrific blog. |
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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.
You can see the geographical composition of the teams in 3 ways:
Data source: Global football Database |
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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.
One of the organizations that made statistics available is UNAIDS, the United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS. I used Google Earth to visualize the country prevalence rates among adults for 149 countries in 2005 they provide. I used icon size to diferentiate between countries with low, moderate and high prevalence rates and the balloons provide a visual representation of the percentage of adult population infected for each counry. |
View in Google Earth
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