Sean Askay, a Google employee who develops geospatial content for the Google Earth Outreach program, has introduced a powerful tribute to fallen American soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Called Map The Fallen, the project has been a couple of years in the works and makes use of the newest features Google Earth 5.0 has to offer. For each fallen soldier is included a personal profile highlighting their lives, contributions and where they’re from.
The map layer, which honors over 5, 700 soldiers, includes over 24, 000 placemarks, 6, 000 folders, 2, 500 screen overlays and line arcs with over 250, 000 vertices, and makes use of iframes, CSS, Javascript support in balloons and time-based navigation.
Askay pulled the data from a slew of sources, including the Department of Defense’s Statistical Information Analysis Division, icasualities.org, Honor the Fallen from MilitaryTimes.com, Faces of the Fallen from the Washington Post, the Iraq and Afghanistan pages and Legacy.com. Google Maps and Geonames.org geocoding services were used to find the coordinates of each soldiers origin and place of death.
While we don’t celebrate Memorial Day in Canada, we have lost soldiers fighting the same wars with the United States, and this incredible dataset really illuminates the negative impact of international fighting.
