MapTube: Create, combine and share your data on maps

Seeing a recent post from The Map Room reminded me that I had neglected to finish an earlier post I had started about MapTube, a website for sharing maps created with the GMapCreator software, released by University College London's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).

The main principle of MapTube is that shared maps can be overlayed to compare data visually. For example, to see a map of the London Underground overlayed on top of a map of population, go to the search page and enter the keywords "tube" and "population". Then click on the two relevant maps to add them. They will be displayed when you click on "View".

The maps themselves are not stored on the server, but only a link to another site on the Internet where the map is already published. When maps are shared, information about what the map is and what it shows is entered by the owner and this is stored on the server along with the link to where the map is published. The raw data is never stored on the Internet as the maps comprise the pre-rendered tiles made by the GMapCreator, so this is a safe way of sharing a map without giving away the raw data used to create it.

The BBC (my employer) has used the site to run a couple of user surveys on issues such as the credit crunch and anti-social behaviour and then display the results on a map.

As a simple tool for creating choropleth maps - where the data is gathered by a defined geographical area - it seems to work really well.

Overlaying multiple maps is a bit more fiddly but I can see how it could be a very rewarding feature of the site.

Some of the combinations I tried were hard to decipher and added no real benefit but as the site develops and the number of shared maps increases this should improve - and being able to easily send a link to your newly created combined map is good news.

One suggestion. More often than not, the complexity of the Google maps foundation layers are too detailed and distracting from the data layers.

Using simplified base layers or providing a fade function as in Ordnance Survey's new UK Election Map service would be a good move.