Juzer Burhani

Periodically during the last three years since Google Earth was released, some talented developer gets the Google Earth bug and develops a wave of cool stuff. Right now, the guy with the most momentum is Bjørn Sandvik at the United Nations Association (UNA) of Norway. He's written a flood of blog posts in the last few weeks at his Thematic Mapping Blog with really innovative visualizations and applications of GIS technology for Google Earth. This week, he's released a cool new application he calls the Thematic Mapping Engine (TME). TME lets you easily take data (no programming required!) from UNdata and create initially 3D prism charts (country shape files represent data about each according to height for things like life expectancy, population, etc.). Bjørn's TME lets you easily create different charts and view them in Google Earth in 3D. He also has plans for other kinds of chart projections/symbols. Not only that, but based on initial feedback, he's now added the ability to view the output using the new Earth API plugin. So, if you're on Windows with a supported browser, you can view the output right on the web page. The screenshot here shows one of the charts with the plugin. You can still get a KML version for loading in the full GE as well. Great idea!