My colleagues at The Washington Post, Gene Thorp and Nelson Hsu, published an Iraq “Big Bombings” map recently using some Flash ActionScript code that I developed. The map allows you to track some of the deadliest attacks in Iraq since September 2006. Markers represent incidents in which 20 or more people were killed. Rolling over a marker will show that incident’s details.
The code behind the scenes is reading latitude and longitudes in decimal degrees and projecting the coordinates on-the-fly to the map’s Albers x-y space and scaling them to screen coordinates onto the base map. This makes updating the map’s thematic content a breeze since only the XML text file powering the thematic layer needs to be updated (the Flash base map doesn’t need to be regenerated).