Show HN: Mapipedia

A web platform I've written to make it easy for people to share goespatial time series data and display it on animated heatmaps. There's also a social media component that allows you to write comments, follow, share and like data sets that you want to engage with. You can also download the CSV data and embed animations into your own websites. People uploading datasets can also choose to make money by accepting donations.

Please check out the home page for more details: https://mapipedia.com

Here are some samples of things created with the platform (press the play button to start the animations!)

1. USA Formation (states and flags): https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/united_states_of_america_fo...

2. Average Life Expectancy: http://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/average_life_expectancy_by_c...

3. Growth of The Salvation Army: https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/growth_of_the_salvation_arm...

4. Aids Related Deaths: https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/aids_related_deaths_worldwi...

5. Prevalence of overweight children under 5: https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/prevalence_of_overweight_ch...

6. Population Growth: https://mapipedia.com/s/u/drdave/global_population_growth_si...

Thanks for taking the time to check it out. This is the first time I've actually told anyone about this platform. I've been very close to it for a long time so it will be good to get feedback from others. All feedback is appreciated!

Cheers David

Thanks! I just updated it. Cheers

Hello David,

Very interesting project. If you improve the design to something more modern it will attract many people. But still, I found it very interesting and learned some new things by checking the average life expectancy :)

Hi there,

is it possible to have different shapes for different timesteps? The borders of the states of today were very different 120 years ago. Some were radically diffrent (Germany, Russia), some didn't even exist (Slovakia, Croatia, Sub Sahara-African Nations), some don't exist anymore today (Austro-Hungarian Empire).

Hi, thanks for your question. It kind of is. I would like to get to the point where I could change the maps over time to accurately represent things. However, there is some limited capacity to do it now through the use of region groups. So you can't change the regions themselves, but you can group them together. For example, you could model USSR as Russia and some of the Eastern European countries (I haven't created a youtube video on how to do that yet, but it's pretty easy - there is an example in the USA formation animation where Virginia gets split into West Virginia and Virginia around 1863). Region groups were also created to represent data on larger scales. For example if you want to represent a sales region for Western Europe you could group those countries together in a region group. Then your CSV data would only need to have one row for 'Western Europe' that would then shade all the regions in that group.