"Dynamic" Labels & StyleMaps

I've been unhappy with how Google Earth handles labeling of shapes - the Placemark KML object is pretty good at containing a single shape, but breaks down when handling multiple shapes. Placemark elements contain the name and description elements, but only Point elements pick up on these. As I have talked about before, you can't label a Polygon without using a Point. I started to use the MultiGeometry to group together Polygon elements that belong to one geography (i.e. when a County has a couple of noncontiguous shapes). The annoying part is that I needed to add a Point for labels to show up.

When dealing with complex geographies, like Block Groups, having the labels show up the entire time doesn't work very well. For example in the last map I shared, there are ~4,300 Block Groups in WA and having the labels all show up doesn't work very well because they overlap and make it quite confusing. You can play with breaking out the labels into a different Placemark and perhaps a folder structure at the County/County Subdivision level might help, but it still isn't perfect because you would have to hunt and peck for what you were looking. In looking through the KML spec, I was excited to find the StyleMap element. The StyleMap element provides a mechanism to have a Placemark respond to mouseover/click/highlight events. You can define a Style element for both normal and highlight classes. I thought this would be a great way to provide a label: when a user moves their mouse over a geography (e.g. Block Group, County Subdivision, County) the label could show up - the normal style would have it transparent and the normal would have it opaque.

Well, turns out it doesn't quite work that way. Unfortunately, the only thing that sparks the transformation is the user moving their mouse over the icon of a Point: the style doesn't change if they mouseover the label or any of the Polygon elements in the Placemark. What is odd, however, is that all of the elements of the Placemark do respond to the new style when you mouseover the icon.

What you'll see below are maps of Median Household Value (variable H85 MEDIAN VALUE (DOLLARS) FOR ALL OWNER-OCCUPIED HOUSING UNITS [1] from Summary File 3) by County Subdivision. I'm not entirely happy with my new labeling, but it works such that when you mouseover the icon at the center of the polygon, the name of the County Subdivision shows up and the border is highlighted in white. I like the effect, but I am not happy with how I have to have an icon show up. In the maps below, the more red an area/shape, the higher the median household value - the greener, the lower the median household value. In the 3D maps, each $1,000 of value adds one meter of height.

Movie:


Screenshot (notice how Leavenworth-Lake Wenatchee is highlighted):