KML Factbook – world data visualisation tool

The CIA World Factbook is an amazing bank of information useful to educators helping students gather facts and information about foreign countries. For geography teachers it should be an essential bookmark.

For some students, the CIA Factbook will be difficult to use, and the information is presented in a very dry way. Which is why the KML Factbook will be a welcome  tool. It’s basically a mashup of the CIA site with Google Earth.

The KMLFactbook utilizes data available from the CIA World Factbook to let you select different sets data about the world and see 2D and 3D graphs of the data by country on either a 2D Google Map or via the 3D Google Earth plugin. You can also generate a KML file to view the data directly within Google Earth.

In the example above the death rate from HIV/AIDS has been superimposed over each nation.

Geography teachers – here’s another one to bookmark!

Related posts:

1. Global Data Visualisation Tools
2. Japan Earthquake Data in Google Earth
3. World Wide Telescope
4. Data Handling with Census at School
5. Google Earth v6 released