The Maps of the Week

The Berliner Morgenpost is a creator of consistently great mapped visualizations. Their map of last week's Berlin election is another superb example of how spatial data can be presented and analysed on an interactive map.

The 2016 Berlin Election map shows the election results in every electoral ward in the city. If you click on a party name in the map legend you can also see the ten districts where that party got its highest share of the the vote. For example, if you click on 'AfD' you can see that the anti-immigration party got its biggest share of the vote in seats which were in the old East Germany.

You can view the Berliner Morgenpost's analysis of the vote by using the links running along the bottom of the map. The 'Rechtruck' link, for example, shows a choropleth view of the AfD's vote share across the capital. This shows that the party actually performed reasonably well across the whole city and only failed to get below 5% of the vote in 33 of the 653 electoral areas.

This week also saw the release of a new travel time interactive map, from Urbica, called Galton. The map can help you discover how far you can walk or drive in ten minutes within major cities around the world.

To find out how far you can walk or drive in ten or twenty minutes you just need to move the black dot on the map to the starting point of your journey. The dark blue area will then show you how far you can walk (or drive) in ten minutes. While the light blue area shows where you could walk in twenty minutes.

The travel time algorithm used by Galton uses the Open Source Routing Machine with OpenStreetMap map data to work out the travel time distances. The project code of Galton is open and available on GitHub. You can also learn more about Galton and how it was developed on the Urbica blog.


Dark Sky provide hyper-local weather information with its iOS and Android apps. It also provides a desktop weather map which includes a seven day forecast of weather conditions around the world.

The Dark Sky Weather Map provides the option to view global weather conditions on an interactive 3d globe. The map includes a number of different weather layers which allow you to view a seven day forecast of temperature, precipitation and wind speed around the world.

The Dark Sky 3d weather visualization uses OpenLayers with the Cesium WebGL 3d globe engine. The Dark Sky Weather Map also includes an option to embed the weather map and 3d globe on your own website or blog.