This interesting story comes out of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London courtesy of the BBC.
Using a freeware app know as the Google Map Creator, a team of clever geographers has developed the the London Profiler website. According to the team, here you can visualise your neighbourhood’s profile using different area classifications through the Google Map interface. All the themes have been created with GMap Creator. Think amazing, thematic mapping served up via google maps. About the application…
The Google Map Creator is a freeware application designed to make thematic mapping using Google Maps simpler. The application takes a shapefile containing geographic areas linked with attributes and automatically generates a working Google Maps website from the data. It does this by pre-creating all the necessary files and saving them into a directory. Publishing the map on the web is then just a matter of copying files onto a web server, allowing Google Maps to be used with the majority of ISPs. See http://www.londonprofiler.org/