I Created an Interactive Map Web App for Geography Lovers
A favorite past time in my childhood was looking into the Atlas. The Atlas my father bought for me had global and local maps. I used to spend countless hours looking at them. It was the easiest way to travel the world. I would look at certain continents and countries and dreamed that someday I will travel to these places. I slowly got pretty interested in geography. Locating places on the map felt fun. When I was around 10, I went to the National Museum. I saw a huge map of Bangladesh and there were small light bulbs on top of each districts. You could tell the museum staff which district you are from and he would switch on the corresponding light bulb. I found that very exciting as a kid.
Even after growing up, I never stopped enjoying geography. The museum light bulb inspired me and recently I’ve built a visualization tool to interact with the world map. Based on different topics, it’s going to allow you to highlight different countries on the world map. Here is the link to the website https://showmeonthemap.com
What the project does
At its core, ShowMeOnTheMap is a world map you can ask questions to, not with a text prompt, but by choosing a topic and seeing the answer visually.
Key features
40+ data overlays — color-code countries by continent, language, religion, historical empire, driving side, government type, economy, and more
Overlay combining — stack multiple overlays (e.g. Ottoman Empire + Arabic language) to see where categories intersect with stripe/hatch patterns
6 categories — Geography, History, Demographics, Politics, Economy, Fun
14 historical empires — Roman, Ottoman, Mongol, British, French, Spanish, Byzantine, Persian, and more
Auto-fit zoom — map automatically zooms to fit all highlighted countries
Shareable URLs — every overlay/zoom/pan combo generates a unique link
Visited countries tracker — sign in with Google to mark and display countries you’ve been to
Location star — optional browser geolocation to show your home country
It’s a fun project. It doesn’t solve any big problems. Give it a try. Let me know, if you want to see anything else in it.