Very promising!

[mrAceT]

I especially like the map!

As with everything, all is a work in progress, so I'dd like to tell you a bit about my first impression. All is ment in a constructive way!

I miss is orientation;
The map stays at a North pointing orientation, I'dd like to actually "go in the direction I'm facing".. that would give traversal through the map more natural "feel" to me.
(I'm Dutch / Frisian) the text/data of the United Kingdom is more or less situated over The Netherlands. There are a lot of smaller countries in Europe, without the above point, finding them is a bit difficult.

Speed
Naturally loading that much data takes time.. but couldn't you load the map more in "chunks"? I think The United States is a good example in the example of the American Museum of Natural History’s anthropology collection. That is a huge tower! Couldn't you just use "fake mini thumbnails" of the imagery and show those images in that tower and when you click that tower and/or zoom in far enough; you enter and load the map of all data of the USA and that tower "explodes" into towers of each state (with real images). That way one could start with the minimum zoom level (in this example the world) and start with the overview (one would just need to load country/number of items, much, much faster!) When clicking a country load the data of that country and show the map of that country and split by state/province if specified (a "back button" would be handy then ;) ). Even zooming in more could be possible splitting up the data even further (by county?).

I think this way of "grouping" can be done with "the tunnel" also (start with grouping by year?) And the race tracks also (combine with tunnel-data, split numbers up by group). Only the "random" map is impossible to split up (but in my opinion is the least interesting one). When one group has a lot of data, it is wise to make more sub groups (like month), so that the "final group" isn't too big to get loaded.. That way the user experience would be optimal.

I think this would improve the experience of your (already awesome!) project even further.