Nick Rabinowitz, a Grad student at UC Berkeley School of Information, posted an interesting announcement on the Google Geo Developer blog this morning. Google TimeMap is a Javascript API for working with geo-temporal data. It combines Google Maps with the excellent SIMILE Timeline and wraps them into a single API. The library supports both JSON and KML data.
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The example above shows the lifespans and geographical locations of major figures of the Renaissance. Click through the image to see it in action.