Interesting Maps and Data

timeanddate.com's path map and local times for the 1 June 2030 annular solar eclipse, whose path runs from North Africa across Russia and China to Sapporo.

Turns OpenStreetMap, NASA and USGS data for any location on earth into organised 3D CAD files within minutes, for architecture and design programs.

3D map of earthquake hypocenters around Japan, showing how deep each quake struck, by Akihiko Kusanagi, creator of Mini Tokyo 3D.

Mongabay and Earth Genome used AI on satellite imagery to find 67 clandestine drug airstrips in Peru's Amazon, 30 inside Indigenous communities where leaders were killed.

Earth Genome maps AI embeddings of Sentinel-2 imagery, then rearranges the planet by similarity so deserts and rainforests on different continents cluster together.

Interactive world map of notable passenger train routes, from high-speed and night trains to scenic, heritage and luxury lines, with facts about each one.

Interactive 3D multi-floor map of Tokyo Game Show 2026 at Makuhari Messe, with searchable exhibitor booths and zones in five languages, built on metamaps.

chizutodesign's 3D model of 13 Tokyo Metro and Toei subway lines at true depth below sea level, with cross-section panels and a cab-view ride mode.

chizutodesign's route planner along Edo-period highways and post towns, estimating travel days on foot, by horse, by express palanquin or by relay courier.

Click a prefecture on a tile map of Japan to rank its 2025 net migration with every other prefecture, from the national resident-register migration report.

GSI's open-source trial viewer for its 3D Digital Japan Basic Map, showing buildings, roads and railways in 3D over terrain in the browser.

Mapbox-powered visual guide from the Strait of Hormuz to Kharg Island, touring 10 key islands, ports and energy hubs.

Beautiful ocean current maps

Gallery of 15 ocean visualisations made for the UN Ocean Conference 2025: currents, sea ice, marine heatwaves, shipping traffic and a Spilhaus-projection sea temperature map.

Cartographer Andy Woodruff’s book of 50+ original maps exploring Boston from many angles.

ForestGeoInfo using MapLibre and Open-Meteo

Qiusheng Wu's hands-on book, with free runnable code, on training deep learning models for satellite and aerial imagery using open-source Python tools.

Free, open-source, cloud-native GIS app for viewing and analysing geospatial data in the browser, on desktop, on mobile or inside Jupyter notebooks.

Interactive explainer walking through how GPS finds your position, from light-speed timing and trilateration to clock errors and relativity corrections.

Aaron Becker's live 3D wind globe plus short map films and essays on winds, currents, rivers and terrain, including a population density map of Japan.

Live 3D map of Amsterdam's GVB metro, showing trains moving along the real track geometry with live trip updates and departure times per station.

3D terrain viewer for ski areas worldwide, draping hourly Open-Meteo forecasts (freezing level, snow line, wind) and avalanche-angle slope shading over the mountain.

Nicholas Rougeux's redrawn, colourised posters of the 1855 New York and Erie Railroad chart, the first modern org chart, with the rail lines drawn as branching trees.

Interactive 3D map of New York City's AI startups, explored block by block across Manhattan and Brooklyn.

In 2025 we found the maps rummaging in Tokyo's Jinbocho area before photographing & collating them into this 136 page paperback.

Open-source MCP server that lets AI agents build editable 3D scenes from real Japanese city models in PLATEAU.

Pan-and-zoom 3D render of the Primland resort estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with its golf course, lodge and river, built to sell its residences.

Open datasets published by MLIT's Project LINKS for land, infrastructure and transport.

Mapbox blog tour of Osaka's detailed 3D landmarks, Dotonbori billboards and dynamic lighting in the Mapbox Standard basemap style.

Self-hosted open-source OSINT dashboard layering 60+ live public feeds, including aircraft ADS-B, ship AIS, satellites, earthquakes and GPS jamming, onto one MapLibre map.

NACIS's book of beautiful and inspiring maps from around the world, published every two years and chosen by an expert panel from an international competition.

Steinforth Studio's six-layer map of Tokyo, separating dense building footprints, the rail network and green space to show the megacity's hidden structure.

greggman's WebGPU x-ray 3D map of 147 Kanto rail lines with ~1,900 trains on mostly simulated timetables, diving into Shinjuku's layered station complex.

A jazz combo played in real time by every active NYC subway train, reimagining Alex Chen's map-as-instrument idea from Google Creative Lab.

Crowdsourced world map of 500,000+ proposed and under-construction urban projects from OpenStreetMap tags, here showing a new road in Mitaka, Tokyo.

Animated world map of 10,886 recorded wars and 442 shifting empire borders across 5,000 years.

Short films of a warming planet built directly from ERA5 reanalysis and NASA and NOAA records, each with notes on the data and methods.

World population browser on a 3D globe.

@ShinagawaJP animates a week of airflow over Japan, showing cold やませ (yamase) winds pouring out of the Sea of Okhotsk high toward Kanto.

Guide to 150+ mountain passes across Japan, each with its own calligraphy sticker sold only at shops near the pass, for drivers who conquer it.

Maps the store locations and service areas of Japanese chains such as Starbucks, Gusto and Gyomu Super, with store counts, area sizes and several brands overlaid.

Volunteer fan club on X sharing fun ways to explore and use GSI Maps (地理院地図), Japan's official web map.

Tokyo Metropolitan Government's 3D digital twin viewer and point-cloud data.

Boston University's list of digitised historical map collections covering Asia.

Motorcycle Paradise's guide to Japan's best roads for riding.

The David Rumsey collection's archive of historical Japanese maps.

John Nelson turns satellite imagery into cartoon-style poster maps in ArcGIS (video).

Google My Map of good riding roads, built over nine years and 110,000 km of touring Japan.

Guide to the C. V. Starr East Asian Library's digitised Japanese historical maps.

Jonni Walker's detailed 3D Mapbox style of the Shenandoah Valley area, Virginia.

Jonni Walker's detailed 3D Mapbox style of Mount Rainier.

Intricately detailed 3D Mapbox style of the Swiss Alps by Jonni Walker.

Another of Jonni Walker's detailed 3D Mapbox styles of the Swiss Alps.

Jonni Walker's Mapbox style of the United States lit up at night.

The Kansai (Osaka) edition of the Jisou historical maps app.

The three huge 17th-century Ryukyu Kuniezu maps, now online in high resolution with zoomable detail of Okinawa.

A digital museum of video game levels you can fly around in the browser.

Jug Cerovic's standardised schematic subway maps of the world's metros, including Tokyo.

Mapbox blog on building richly detailed, painterly map styles in Mapbox Studio.

Edo-period historical maps in a modern map-app design, with comparison to today, 3D terrain and GPS. By @chizutodesign.

Edo-era roads, post towns and sights drawn in a Google Maps style, in the browser.

Android app for browsing old historical maps of Tokyo. 'Jisou' means 'layers of time'.

Craig Taylor and Jonni Walker's animated Vancouver ship traffic (AIS) visual on a detailed Mapbox map.

National Diet Library exhibit of Ino Tadataka's large-scale survey maps of Japan's coast.

A map of parks in Tokyo with bars you can do pull-ups on, visited stamp-rally style.

Database of historical maps held by the International Research Center for Japanese Studies.

MLIT 3D city models for every major Japanese city, as CityGML and 3D Tiles.

MLIT's open GIS datasets for Japan — administrative boundaries, land use, rail, rivers, hazard areas.

Kumoy example map of Japan's 1950 rail network, built from 国土数値情報 railway time-series data.

Custom illustrated maps of Japan and other places.

Packages maps as SVG so they can be styled and manipulated with CSS.

A 'feel' map that turns public transport journeys in Tokyo into a travel story, with 3D trains.

Open dataset of every Japanese address with coordinates, maintained on GitHub.

The Geospatial Information Authority of Japan’s basemap, relief and photo tiles.

Japan's hub for distributing geospatial data from government, industry and academia.

Japanese cloud service for QGIS: share GIS data with your team and publish QGIS maps on the web.

@forestgeoinfo on spotting larch in Hokkaido, Iwate and Nagano and hiba in Aomori and Ishikawa using the forest mesh tiles.

Project LINKS desktop app that estimates which buildings are likely vacant from municipal data and PLATEAU, shown on a map dashboard.

Project LINKS prototype that uses LLMs and OCR to turn paper, PDF and Word government records into structured data, with no-code tools.

Example of a Locanea location analysis report.

Real estate location analysis: surroundings, transit access, disaster risk and zoning on a map, for the Tokyo area.

mrdoob shows off the new three.js example with @shotamatsuda's geospatial volumetric clouds.

Tools and experiments for visualising geo data in JavaScript with Observable Notebooks 2.0.

Linux Foundation project publishing open map data built largely on OSM plus data donated by member companies.

Present & Correct on the fifty early 20th-century pre-war Japanese tourist maps they found in Tokyo and made into a book.

MLIT's cross-sector project to build, use and open up data across land, infrastructure and transport.

Simulates every mountain, building and tree shadow on Earth for any date and time.

three.js example rendering Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles in the browser.

Adds volumetric clouds and atmosphere to the three.js 3D Tiles example, using takram's three-atmosphere and three-clouds.

Every triangle-shaped building in Japan, found in OpenStreetMap data.

@machi_measure maps where business names use 'Kichijoji' or 'Mitaka' to show the shape of each machi.

Forestry Agency data on Japan's forest resources in 20m mesh cells, published as map tiles.

Tokyo Metropolitan Government's web viewer layering open data over 3D city models of Tokyo.

3D models of Hokkaido's coal, steel and port heritage sites on Re:Earth, overlaid with PLATEAU hazard zones.

Census and statistics from e-Stat, mapped down to the chōme level.

chizutodesign's nationwide map colouring every Shinkansen and JR limited express section by its top speed, banded from under 99 km/h to 500 km/h and up.

Map of universal design toilets in Japan.

A custom nullschool earth map showing ocean microbiome data, made for the Tara Ocean research foundation.

Live map of where electricity comes from and its carbon intensity, by country and region.

Manuel Claeys Bouuaert styles OpenStreetMap data in QGIS to look like the 1777 Ferraris map of Belgium.

Tile-based world map and 3D terrain rendering library for Three.js.

Geography game: work out where in the world you are from Street View.

Sebastian Lague builds a game from real-world geographic data (video).

Alastair Tse's interactive maps plotting every train line in Japan.

Mainichi on a contest where people photographed 660,000 manhole covers across eastern Japan to map infrastructure.

Create, share and collaborate on interactive maps, and embed them on your website.

Japanese refill app mapping places to fill your water bottle for free.

A map-making Twitter bot that is also a Slack /quick-map command.

Studio Yorktown's special-edition generative artwork based on the Marunouchi Line, for #tezosjaponica.

Photo book by Ami Sioux: 50 people drew hand-drawn maps to places in Tokyo that matter to them, and she photographed each one.

Daily geography game: guess the country from its shape.

NII's maps of Japan's power plants by generation type alongside night-light imagery, made after the 2011 earthquake.

Map-sharing service in Japan, discussed as a toilet map.

Animated global map of wind, weather, ocean and pollution conditions, updated every three hours.

Eco-map of shops in Japan that are organic, plant-based, plastic-free, zero waste or fair trade.

@chizutodesign shares a nationwide power grid map two years in the making, all on one sheet.

Thomas Logan's accessibility consultancy. He presented on making maps and spatial information accessible.

iPhone app linked to network RTK GPS for high-precision positioning (video, Japanese).

Map where a surname is found across Europe to trace its geographic origin.

Surveyor Rami Tamimi maps terrain with the iPhone 13 Pro's LiDAR sensor (video).

Japanese real estate portal for finding homes on a map.

YAMAP's lab of experimental hiking map features: foliage and snow maps, 3D trail replays, off-trail alerts.

YAMAP's hiking map draws routes thicker where more hikers walk them.

chizutodesign's map of Japan's transmission lines, substations, switching stations and power plants.

A primer on reading the aviation charts pilots navigate with.

Agoop's smartphone-derived people-flow (人流) open data on G空間情報センター.

Dark Sky's weather map rendered in emoji.

Matt Dzugan's ObservableHQ notebook for rendering maps as emoji, with a write-up of how it works.

Illustrated train station map by Erica Ward.

@geo_spatialist's 3D render of the 1956 geological map of Japan, made with ArcGIS Pro and Blender.

Geolonia's CodePen demos of what their Japanese maps and APIs can do.

Ubilabs demo of the 3D Maps JavaScript API announced at Google I/O 2021.

Emoji-styled map project from the Tokyo creative studio PARTY.

Crowdsourced city maps labelling neighbourhoods by who hangs out there.

3D terrain video of the Jungfrau by Sean Conway.

Video game that weaves maps into its storytelling.

MLIT's database of real estate transaction prices across Japan.

Interactive archive of stories from Tokyo's old Tsukiji fish market.

Earth Engine app comparing NOx levels before and after India's COVID lockdowns.

Playful cartography post by Andy Woodruff of Cartogrammar.

Open-source geocoder built on OpenStreetMap and other open data.

Spin the globe to tune into live radio stations around the world.

GeoGuessr-style GIS game: guess the place from its silhouette. By Naoki (naogify). Source: https://github.com/naogify/silhouette-guessr

Stanford's gallery of historical maps of Japan and Asia.

Heatmap of the runs and rides logged on Strava worldwide.

The Pudding maps how local each city's music taste is.

Modular geospatial analysis library for JavaScript.

Every building in Amsterdam coloured by its construction year.

Point your camera at a written place name and it finds the spot on Google Maps.

Walk-rally game with tens of thousands of location puzzles across Japan.

GSI's archive of historical maps of Japan.

GSI's 3D terrain viewer, with models you can export for 3D printing.

Ken Kawamoto uses PLATEAU building models to find every Tokyo rooftop with a line of sight to Mt Fuji.

Jorudan's floor map of Shinjuku Station.

Johns Hopkins' ArcGIS dashboard tracking COVID-19 cases worldwide.

Every road in Tokyo drawn from OpenStreetMap, by @anvaka.

Mapbox's write-up on designing a hand-drawn treasure map style.

Tokyo in the Edo period rendered in Google Maps' style, by @chizutodesign.

Wonderfully detailed articles comparing Google and Apple Maps' design.

Uber's open-source tool for large-scale geospatial visualisation in the browser.

A society for people fascinated by administrative boundaries (境界協会).

Real-time 3D visualisation of Tokyo's trains, by nagix.

Procedurally generated medieval city maps, by watabou.

Tokyo OpenStreetMap meetups on Peatix. Other tech meetups are listed at tokyotech.com.

Ridgeline-style elevation maps of any area, by @anvaka.

Crowdsourced radiation measurements mapped worldwide, started in Japan after 2011.

Exploring Tokyo’s bowl-shaped valleys and micro-topography (東京スリバチ学会).

Live map of bike availability at Docomo bike share ports across Tokyo.

Twitter account collecting and reviewing transit map design.