CartoDB's Carlos Matallín has created an interesting map of One Million Flight Routes to demonstrate the company's Deep Insights platform for mapping and analyzing big data.

CartoDB's Deep Insights is a tool which not only helps you to geocode and map huge amounts of data but also provides filtering and command controls which allow users to identify and visualize patterns and trends within the data.

The One Million Flight Routes map visualizes flight route data from OpenFlights.org. The map shows the world's flight routes and the route ratings from OpenFlights.org. The flight routes are displayed on the map with colored lines and the route ratings are shown using a 5 star scale (red for 1 and green for 5).

The map sidebar uses a number of Deep Insights' filter widgets. These allow you to explore the data for flight route ratings and the maximum & average flight delays for each route.

You can learn more about how Carlos captured and visualized the data on his blog post Visualizing 1M flight routes with CartoDB.

DMOZ is an open-content directory of World Wide Web links which uses a hierarchical scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic in DMOZ are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

Internaut Explorer uses the CartoDB interactive mapping platform to create a visualization of DMOZ's 3,809,444 web links and 782,239 topics. The map allows you to explore a visual representation of DMOZ links organized into a radial chart. Each segment of the circle shows a different DMOZ category of links. When you zoom in on the map the individual DMOZ link categories appear.


The Internet Map is a Google Map of the 350,000 largest websites in the world. The map was created by Ruslan Enikeev and the Russian creative agency Positive Communications.

The circles on the map represent individual websites. The size of each circle on the map is determined by website traffic. The larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. The location of websites on the map is determined by the links between sites. The more traffic generated from links between different websites then the closer the websites are displayed on the map.

It is actually possible to search the map by country to find the most popular websites in individual countries.


Unfortunately the Web 2.0 Summit's Web 2 Map no longer exists. The Web 2 Map used an interesting geographical metaphor to visualize the internet, representing different sectors of the Internet as countries on a map.

Each country on the map had a capital city representing the dominant website or company within that sector. The buildings or skyscrapers in the city acting as a metaphor for the different data segments within the dominant player in that sector.

For example, the country of the Union of Social Networks included a Facebook capital city. The Facebook city was dominated by a 'social' skyscraper but also includeed a smaller 'location' building to reflect that Facebook also allows users to check-in at different locations.


Every year Telegeography create an interactive map of the physical presence of the internet in the real world, with their undersea cable map.

The 2015 Submarine Cable map is inspired by medieval and renaissance cartography and features not only a vintage map style but sea monsters, map border illustrations and images showing some of the common causes of cable faults.

The map shows 299 submarine cable systems across the globe, that are active or are under construction. The border illustrations provide information on the capacity data of some of the major cable routes. Other inset illustrations provide information on how submarine cables are laid.

Images on the map explain some of the common causes of cable faults. Some fictional causes of cable faults are also included in the map in the form of mythical sea monsters. The text provided with each monster includes a reference to which historical map the mythical creature was taken from.

Last week Maps Mania linked to CartoDB's Referee Map, an animated heatmap of one soccer referee's movements during a soccer game. The map uses CartoDB's Torque library to animate the referee's heat map over the ninety minutes of a single match.

Player heatmaps are obviously very popular in other sports. In the NBA shooting heatmaps can be used to reveal the individual shooting patterns of different players, showing where they are most dangerous on the court. 2014-15 NBA Regular Season : Field Goal Shooting Patterns is a CartoDB map that shows the shooting heatmaps of five players during the 2014-15 season.

Using the map you can view and compare the shooting heatmaps of Stephen Curry, Anthony Davis, James Harden, LaMarcus Aldridge and LeBron James.

Rock band Rush are celebrating 40 years in the music business with the R40 Tour. Starting in May they will be visiting 34 cities in North America. Of course over their 40 years as a band they have performed in many locations around the world.

Rush Performances 1968-2015 is an animated map showing all of the band's live gigs in the last 40 years. The map tracks the band's performances in chronological order. At the beginning of the band's career their gig's are concentrated around their home town of Toronto. As their popularity rises they soon start touring around the Northeastern United States.

The timeline animation tool shows the number of the concert currently being displayed on the map. This is a shame as a time-stamp would have been more useful in showing how the band's reach spread geographically over time.

This UFO Sightings Map has only two classifications. The yellow markers show UFO sightings which took place in urban areas and the white markers show sightings in non-populated areas.

We might expect that there would be more UFO sightings in populated areas than in non-populated areas. Common sense suggests that the more people there are then more likely there are to be UFO sightings. However the map seems to suggest that there are more UFO sightings reported in non-populated areas.

Some might argue that this is because non-populated areas are less effected by light pollution and therefore celestial events (like meteors burning up as they enter the Earth's atmosphere) are more likely to be noticed. I like to think however that aliens just don't like people and therefore avoid the most populated areas.

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UFO Maps

U.S. Daily Temperature Anomalies 2010-2013 is an animated map of unusually high and low recorded temperatures in the United States. The map uses CartoDB's Torque library to animate through the four years of temperature data.

The animated weather patterns which emerge on the map seem to reflect the influence of the Westerlies on the United States. As the animation plays out there appears to be a general west to east movement of these temperature anomalies from 2010-2013.


The U.S. Daily Temperature Anomalies 2010-2013 map uses data from the U.S. Daily Temperature Anomalies 1964-2013 map.  This timeline and map plots temperature anomalies from 2,716 weather stations in the US, which have data going back 50 years.

Each station's daily temperature recordings have been compared to the corresponding monthly distribution. If the temperature at the station fell in the bottom or top 2% on a given day it is labelled an anomaly.

The map animates through the 50 years of temperature anomalies at all 2,716 weather stations. Warm anomalies are show on the map in red and cold anomalies are displayed with blue dots. Beneath the map a graph plots the yearly proportion of warm anomalies to cold anomalies. The graph shows a clear trend towards ever increasing warm anomalies in the United States.

Two weeks ago CartoDB released CartoDB Heat Maps. This new heat maps option in CartoDB leverages the power of the Torque library, which allows developers to efficiently render and publish very large datasets to the client.

One of the first maps to use CartoDB Heat Maps was Placenames Heatmap. This excellent map allows you to view a heat map of words used in United States place names. Type a word into the map and it searches US placenames and creates a heat map of the results.

However CartoDB Heat Maps can also be used to create animated heat maps. Where this could be particular useful is in visualizing weather data and patterns. For example, check-out this map of historical Hurricane and Tropical Cyclone Track Density. The map animates the track density of hurricanes and tropical cyclones from 2000-2013, using data from the National Climatic Data Center - NOAA.

CartoDB has released CartoDB Heat Maps. The new heat maps option in CartoDB leverages the power of the Torque library, which allows developers to efficiently render and publish very large datasets to the client.

Torque is probably best known for its temporal capabilities, which power all those very popular animated Twitter maps that you have no doubt seen (for example this Super Bowl Twitter map). The new CartoDB Heat Maps options can also use Torque's temporal abilities to create animated heat maps.

These new animated heat maps are of course very visually engaging. However, the best example of a map using CartoDB Heat Maps that I've seen so far is this Placenames Heatmap. The map allows you to view a heat map of words used in United States place names.

Type a word into the map and it searches US placenames and creates a heat map of the results. In the screenshot at the top of this post you can see the results of searching for placenames, including the words 'silver' and 'gold'.


You can view an example of an animated heat map on the Chicago Sun Times. The Times has taken data from the use of Chicago's snow plows during the recent blizzards to create an animated heat map showing Chicago's streets being cleared on the 1st and 2nd February.

Another example of an animated heat map is Farmer Heatmap. This one lets you watch an animated heat map of a farmer plowing, sowing or harvesting his fields (I'm not sure which).

World Flags is a CartoDB map in which the shape of every country had been overlaid with the country's flag. This patchwork effect appears to have been made by creating a polygon for each country and then filling the polygon with the correct flag image.

The flag polygons are themselves overlaid on top of Stamen's Watercolor map tiles.


Last year the Van Gogh Map also used images for land areas on a world map. This map was created with Mapbox GL (it therefore needs a WebGL enabled browser to view) and uses a different technique to fill in the land areas on the map.

Feature types on this map, such as water and different types of land cover, are made up of map tiles created with textures taken from Van Gogh paintings. The result is a map style which you probably wouldn't want to use very often but is a neat demo of how easy it is to create interesting map styles with Mapbox GL.

Earlier this month Andrew Hill created a beautiful looking map of U.S. Rivers Colored by the Direction they Flow. Europeans now have their own river flow map.

Rivers of Europe is a CartoDB map showing only European rivers. The map uses the same color scheme as Andrews' US rivers map so I assume that the European map also colors each river by its direction of flow. If you click on the 'Datasets used in this map' you see the data used in the map. The data includes a column for 'bearing' so it is likely that that the rivers are colored by their direction of flow.

Swedish radio station Sveige Radio has mapped the journeys of a number of Syrian refugees. Reporters from the station have been following the progress of over 70 Syrians over the past year, as they try to escape the crisis in Syria and enter 'Fortress Europe'.

At the heart of Sverige Radio's report on Fortress Europe is a CartoDB powered map. You can access the journeys and stories of the individual refugees (and their families) from the map menu. If you select a name from the menu you can view their path to Europe on the map and read details about their journey beneath the map.

The report on each individual or family includes details on their decision to leave Syria and the difficulties they faced in entering Europe. Many of the reports include an audio interview with the refugee.

The United Kingdom, like many other countries, has a green belt policy for controlling urban sprawl. The policy defines zones (a green belt) around urban centers where new building is restricted and where agriculture, forestry and outdoor leisure prevails.

The English Greenbelt is a CartoDB created map of greenbelt areas in England. The map contains two main layers, the green belt zones and local authority boundaries & labels. If you click on a green belt area on the map you can find out the local authority and the name of the selected green belt area.

If you scored more than 7 out of 10 in the Washington Post's Street Map Quiz then you have qualified to have a guess at the country shown in the map above.

NRCQ has created a series of maps of the Netherlands using only man made features. The Zo Zag Je Nederland Nog Nooit maps include a map of just the country's road network, a map of only railway lines, metros and tramways in the Netherland's biggest cities, a map showing only the country's wind turbines and a map showing only police stations.

There is no quiz involved in the NRCQ post, just a series of interesting maps. If you've read this far then you'll know that the map above shows part of the Netherlands. This particular map was created by just mapping the country's electricity power lines.

It has been another successful year for CartoDB's temporal mapping Torque library. Even as 2014 begins to wind down the Torque maps still keep coming.

Yesterday AirAsia flight QZ8501 vanished from radar screens over the Java Sea. This AirAsia Indonesia flight QZ8501 map plots the flight path of the plane from Surabaya to Singapore. The map uses the Torque library to animate the flight of the plane from Surabaya to its last known position, when it lost contact with air traffic control at 06.24 local time.


The Torque library has also been used by the to-do list app Wunderlist for their annual productivity report. The World Productivity List uses the library to visualize where and how the application is used throughout the world over the course of one day.

Torque is often used to show a lot of flashing data on a world map. The Wunderlist maps, like many of these maps, hardly reveals any interesting geographical patterns in the underlying data. However I guess the map succeeds in its main task of demonstrating that Wunderlist has lots of users around the world.

The Washington Post has published an interesting account of the escape of three detainees from Alcatraz in June 1962. No one knows if the three prisoners survived their escape attempt or died while trying to navigate the strong currents of the San Francisco Bay,

The Washington Post's report, The Alcatraz Escapees Could have Survived, is based on the work of Dutch researchers who have been working on a model which simulates the movement of particles and detritus in bays. Based on this model the Dutch researchers have concluded that the three Alcatraz prisoners may have survived, but only if they left the island at the right time.

The report includes two animated CartoDB maps, one showing the worst case scenario and one showing the best case scenario. Both maps use tidal records to model the water-flow in the San Francisco Bay on the evening of the escape.

As the animation plays out on both maps you can view the likely track of the escapees based on the different times during the evening when they could have left Alcatraz. The animated boats on the map are colored to show the time of escape. In the best case scenario, as long as the escapees left before 1 a.m. and paddled north, they may have made it to the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge and freedom.

The Vancouver Land Prices Heat Map visualizes the price for Vancouver parcels of land based on the 2014 BC assessment data from tax reports. Land parcels on the map are colored to reflect the price per square foot of the property.

The map shows that many of Vancouver's most expensive properties are concentrated in the Downtown, West End and Fairview neighborhoods. The map also shows that land prices tend to get cheaper the further you move east in the city. If you select a building lot on the map you can view the exact price per square foot for the property.

I'm a huge fan of the New York Public Library's Map Warper project. Using the tool people have been digitally aligning the library's historical map collection so that the maps can be overlaid on modern interactive maps. The result is that you can now browse over 10,000 historical maps on the Map Warper website.

CartoDB this week noticed that you can also use the map tiles from any of the over 10,000 historical maps in your own interactive maps. They have even posted a great tutorial, Using NYPL Map Warper maps inside CartoDB, explaining the simple process of adding the map tiles from one of the New York Public Library maps to your own CartoDB map.

Of course you can also use the Map Warper map tiles with other mapping platforms. If you follow the CartoDB tutorial, especially the note on tweaking the NYPL Map Warper URL for the map tiles, you should be able to easily work out how you can add a NYPL historical map to a Leaflet, Mapbox or Google Maps API map.

As an example of displaying one of the maps with Leaflet.js I've added the NYPL's Railroad Map of the United States to my growing map of  Map Tiles for Leaflet.

Recently Stephen Von Worley created a series of beautiful maps, Crayon the Grids, in which the U.S.'s roads were colored by orientation. Andrew Hill has created a similar map of U.S. Rivers Colored by the Direction they Flow.

The map uses data from Nelson Minar's Vector River Map, which in turn uses river flow data from NHDPlus. Andrew has also used the same river data to create another beautiful map. Rivers with Rainfall. This map shows U.S. rivers and rainfall in the last hour. The rain data comes from a National Weather Service data feed.

On the eve of Thanksgiving the brave men and women of the City of Newark were busy plowing the streets of snow. Their efforts have been immortalized for ever in this animated map of the City's twelve snow plows in action.

Snow Plow Trucks in Newark, NJ is a CartoDB map which shows the animated tracks of each of the City's snow plows on the day of the 26th November. The action starts at ten in the morning and continues through until 9.30 pm.

You can select to view all of the City's snow plows in action or select to view the movements of individual plows. The play-back control allows you to track the time of day and to navigate to any time during the day.

CartoDB has released two nice new basemaps, which can be used for free in any CartoDB or Leaflet created map. The two new basemaps, based on OpenStreetMap data, are called Positron and Dark Matter.

Positron is a grey-scale map and Dark Matter is a darker, black and grey map. You can explore both the new basemaps on my little Map Tiles for Leaflet map. This CartoDB blog post includes details about how you can add the two basemaps to either a CartoDB or Leaflet map.