Monday, May 25, 2009

An On-line, Interactive, Memorial Day Memorial


Interactive map tool creates online memorial to U.S., coalition troops
(CNN) -- Each year on Memorial Day, tens of thousands of Americans visit Arlington National Cemetery just outside Washington to pay tribute to the men and women who died serving the United States.
MapTheFallen.org uses arcing lines to connect locations of the service members' deaths to their hometowns.

For people who are unable to make the trip, a new online memorial provides a unique way to honor those service members who have fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The new Google Earth layer, called Map the Fallen, enables the user to pinpoint where, when, and how each service member died since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. A line connects the service member's approximate location of death to his or her hometown.

The interactive tool -- available at mapthefallen.org -- also offers a detailed profile of each person.

Sean Askay, a Google engineer with no military affiliation who developed the layer in his free time, explains the project on his blog. [...]

What a great idea. Read the whole thing for more info, and another photo.
     

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