Dataset of the Day: Tour de France 2009 – An Interactive Spectator's Map

If you’re like me, you are a fan of the Tour de France. I’m an athlete myself and think I’m pretty tough, but watching these 135 pound men scale mountains and sprint across finish lines in 21 different stages is truly exciting from a spectator’s standpoint. It turns out that I’m not the only fanatic, and thanks to people’s enthusiasm for the sport we can follow the race stage by stage and interact with it in new and exciting ways.

Thanks to Thomas Vergouwen, whose site Paris.thover.com/ allows you to download a kml file of the entire 2009 Tour Route, we can use Maker! to map out the stages of the Tour. Below is the map complete with stages and paths and by clicking on points along the way you can view details about that stage. You can even zoom in and see the French towns the cyclists go through or zoom in on some of the mountains in the tougher stages. Even the official Tour site only has flat maps of the course, but with this map you can really interact with it and get more data than a pdf allows.

#maker_map_188 {width: 100%; height: 400px;}

View full map

Maker.maker_host=’http://maker.demo.geoiq.com’;Maker.finder_host=’http://finder.demo.geoiq.com’;Maker.core_host=’http://core.demo.geoiq.com’;
Maker.load_map(“maker_map_188″, “188″);

I thought it might be interesting to layer this map with more interactive geodata, so I added three layers of geotagged photographs of the Tour as it’s happening from Flickr. You can use sites like Flickr or Panaramio to upload your photos that contain geographical information such as latitude and longitude, and upload the link location of the kml into Finder!, and then make a map of current photographs using Maker! There are still some glitches and difficulties in getting a ton of photos at once and getting only the photos you want, but you get a general idea of how truly interactive data and maps have become. Click the layers on and off to see details and photos of the Tour 2009 as its happening.

If you have a great kml file of geotagged photos of the Tour that you would like to add, post a comment with a link to the data and we’ll upload it for you. Would be great to see how interactive this map can become with just eight stages left in the Tour de France 2009.