A heat map is a data visualization technique often used to display the spread and intensity of events across the a region on a map. For example, a heat map is often shown for the number of earthquakes that have occurred in a country or continent. For displaying the intensity heat maps use color codes – red is shown for high intensity events and violet is shown for smaller intensity events. In case of earthquakes, they use blue color for smaller earthquakes and red color for quakes that record higher on the Richter scale. The light spectrum colors (VIBGYOR) are used for displaying the intensity.
If you want to create a heat map of your own, then you can use a small application called World Heatmap Creator. This application can help you generate a map of the world with your points of interested displayed in form of heat points. It makes use of OpenStreetMap API to create the world map and save it in form of HTML files along with supporting JS and CSS files.
You have to begin by adding countries that you want to be displayed on the map. You can select a country from the drop-down list and it will automatically show its latitude and longitude coordinates. You can then click on the Add button and it will be added to the list. You can add as many location you want to add.
After adding all the desired locations, you can click on the Create World Heatmap button and save the map to a folder of your choice. You can later open this heatmap in any web browser and it will display the locations using the popular heatmap points. Since it is using OpenStreetMap, you can zoom in and out of the map to see more details. You can also save the list of locations to a file for later use.
Heatmap Creator is a nifty little tool if you want to display incidents or occurrences or any other kind of data distributed over the world map. It uses OpenStreetMap API and therefore detailed information about locations is available.
You can download World Heatmap Creator from https://vovsoft.com/software/world-heatmap-creator/.