As someone who has one foot in the ArcGIS world and another in the GoogleEarth/GoogleMaps world, I’m continually annoyed at how cumbersome it is to shuffle data back and forth between the two product lines. I’ll skip the diatribe for now and instead just point out a cool new tool that I ran across last week when I was getting ready to talk to a Women’s Studies class that will be using GoogleMaps for a class project.
The website, thematicmapping.org, features a blog with tips and tricks for creating KML-based thematic maps. But more importantly, it provides a tool that you can use to create KML-based thematic maps for a variety of global data indicators. Although the selection of indicators is rather limited, thematicmapping.org also makes its API available so that you can create thematic maps from your own data sources. Now if I just had a programmer at my beck and call…
Below is a screen shot of the Thematic Mapping Engine interface along with a snapshot of the resulting KML file