There many ways to make thematic maps openheatmap just made it even easier, as Pete Warden says he wants to make the "YouTube for maps", its been available since July.
I prodded him into adding up Irish geo-political boundaries Choropleth maps templates.
I searched for Irish boundaries and thanks to by Ben Raue for the KML 2007 constituencies, Councils from the CSO (councils to be added to openheatmap soon) and Counties (KML).
Its a JQuery plugin using either Flash or HTML5’s Canvas overlayed on openstreetmap. Its open source and free to copy and run the most of the setup off your own site.
For Ireland use these as the name columns...
ire_constituency (2010 redrawn constituencies)
ire_constituency_2007
ire_constituency_2007_code
ire_constituency_code
ire_county
ire_county_code
Councils to come...
and then the value column.
or tab_FF, tab_FG etc. for the each map tab.
You can use .csv,(comma separated files), saved from your spreadsheet program or load them from a public a Google Docs spreadsheet.
Upload your map, it will make your aware of any problems, and once you have those fixed, you can preview the map and changed the colours and range settings for you data and then share the link to the map or copy the embed code for your own site.
Pete Warden has made a helpful video to explain it all. The full detailed documentation is here with the source at github/openheatmap
I saw this UK election results tabbed maps example and I used Openheatmap to make an Irish version.
I used the 2007 Election results summary (pdf). You'll find more election results to try at environ.ie Typically for the Irish government it comes in messed up tables in pdf instead of a spreadsheet file. Google Doc version
Time by heat maps has been available from the site, by adding a time column, and you can use an address column to automatically place addresses on heatmap, these have been available for a while but its hard to find good data to use for Ireland, geocoding still presumes addresses are in American so I suggest using Batchgeo, which you can restrict results to Ireland and review and correct and hand place some of the erroneous results. Most info is done by constituency, county or council so this should make it easier to to find data to apply. Animated time by heat map example
Lisbon Openheatmap
Lisbon results google doc
Lisbon II 2009 results
