| VIEW: |  | birthplace |  | hometown |  | residence |
Click on a location to see the geographic distribution of Canada's 2006 winter Olympic athletes. The Google map is fully interactive; click on a location marker to see athlete information. Please note that the data markers do not mark specific addresses for athlete residences. Markers are placed on cities and towns, and then randomly shifted to allow visibility. Note also that some athletes list more than one hometown or residence in the Athlete handbook; in such cases I have marked the first place listed.
For those who are interested in the technical details, here is the XML file that stores the athlete data for the map. Almost all of the work here was in creating the XML file, which I tried to automate as much as possible (see references below). Here is the XSL template that formats the XML data in the marker annotations.
References:
- Google Maps API
- COC 2006 Team Handbook
- O'Reilly XML.com, Hacking Maps with the Google Maps API
- Geocoder.ca, a free geocoding service for Canadian addresses.
- worldKit Geocoder and TravelGIS.com, which I used to manually find latitudes and longitues for intenational cities.
- I used MATLAB to search the COC database, and to query Geocoder.ca through its XML API.