Sunday, February 05, 2012

Google Maps of the Week


This week's most popular map on Google Maps Mania by a country mile was the Skyrim Map. This map of the popular role-playing game was viewed by at least five times more people than any other map I posted about this week.

The Skyrim Map uses custom map tiles with the Google Maps API to provide an interactive map of the Elder Scrolls game-world of Tamriel. The map includes the option to view markers showing the locations of holds and primary locations in the game.


Personally my favourite map of the last week was Ejecuciones en Chile entre septiembre y diciembre de 1973. This map is a powerful and poignant animated map visualisation of people executed by the Chilean military dictatorship between September 11 and December 31, 1973.

The map animates through a time-line of the executions geo-locating those murdered by place of death or where the body was discovered. As well as providing an animated time-line of the executions the map can be browsed by location, date of death, cause of death and by the name of individual victims of the 1970's Chilean dictatorship.


Finally, this week I was alos impressed with Deutsche Telekom's Worldwide Operations Map. The map itself is a simple store-locator that shows the scope of Deutsche Telekom's worldwide operations and lists the names of its companies operating in various countries around the world.

The map uses the Google Maps API Styled Maps feature to create a map that complements the colors of the company's corporate style and website design. There is nothing amazingly innovative about the map but it does it's job with little fuss and yet has a striking design.

2 comments:

Mano Marks said...

I love these. I would say about the Deutsche Telekom map is that in larger countries implies to me that they only operate in limited areas, which is not true. I know they are conveying locations of offices, but it could easily be confused with operations areas. OTOH, I love the style, very sleek.

Gabriel Mérida said...

Thanks so much for the mention. I'm one of the journalists working on the
project, and the developer of the map. I should add that this data
wasn't available publicly until we (www.archivoschile.org) asked the
Legal-Medical Service (the institution that oversee the deaths in
Chile) to digitalize the information of their old registry books
making it public. All of this was possible thanks to the recently Law
of Transparency, this law says that State Institutions must deliver
information requested for any citizen, becoming a great contribution to the journalism in our country.