Maps of the Fortnight

It has been a quiet couple of weeks and, as there was no Maps of the Week post last week, this week we have a Maps of the Fortnight post.

Helsinki Ennen is a collection of beautiful historical maps and photographs of the Finnish capital. A time-line runs along the bottom of the map. Select a decade from the time-line and you can view vintage photographs of Helsinki from that decade overlaid on a map dating from the chosen era.

Many of the photographs are also displayed side-by-side with the same view as it is seen today, using Google Maps Street View. This allows you to see how the city has changed over the course of the Twentieth Century.


This year Chris Whong created an impressive interactive map from New York Taxi Data. A number of other developers have used the same data, collated by Chris, to create their own interactive maps.

The latest map of New York taxi journeys is NYC Taxi Map 2013. This one is an impressive example of using Google Maps with Google Cloud Dataflow. Using Cloud Dataflow the map geo-fences the taxi data by New York neighborhoods. The result is that you can click on an area on the map to find out the distribution of drop-off locations, the average fare, average tip percentage and average number of passengers of trips that started in each New York neighborhood.  


Schipol Go International is a map of all international destinations that you can fly to from Amsterdam's Schipol airport.

The use of the Google Maps API styled map feature and custom information windows gives the map a vibrant design. The addition of background sound to the map gets a little annoying but you can turn the sound off. The map also include sound effects for each map interaction, which would be far less annoying on their own, and I guess could even aid navigation of the map.

If you select a destination on the map you can learn a few facts about the selected location, such as the flight time, local time and the number of days a week flights leave Schipol for the destination.