Every now and again a web based service comes along that takes our breath away, Bjørn Sandvik's Thematic Mapping Engine is one of those services.
Bjorn is a project manager at United Nations Association (UNA) of Norway who is currently on study leave to undertaking a master's in Geography Information Science (GIS) at University of Edinburgh. His Thematic Mapping Engine enables you to visualise global statistics on Google Earth in a way that only a few years ago would of been a showstopper using high end tools such as ESRI's ArcGlobe.
Its is quick easy with a colour scale that fits the mapping well, our movie below illustrates Global Population in 2005.
It is simple to use - go the the main page of the Thematic Engine and select a required indicator - we picked Population. You can then choose your technique of mapping - we chose Prism - and date etc. Its self explanatory with a KML provided to open in Google Earth.
For anyone interesting in mapping the Thematic Mapping Engine is well worth a look.
