Thematic Maps on Virtual Globes Mátyás Gede Department of Cartography and Geoinformatics, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary Abstract. With the emerge of virtual globes several new visualization methods appeared, taking advance of the possibilities of this new media. Just like it happened in web-mapping, where thousands of ugly new „maps” was born without any consideration of the traditional cartographic design criteria, everybody started to fill Google Earth with prism maps, graduated 3D symbols and animations with sometimes questionable results. This paper tries to summarize the types of thematic maps on virtual globes, the possible software solutions and to give some hints about cases when such a visualisation is desirable as well as those when it should be avoided. Keywords: Virtual Globes, Thematic Maps, Visualization 1. Introduction Virtual globes offer several possibilities for geographic visualization. As nowadays it is very easy to assemble such “thematic maps”, the Internet is full with these kind of artefacts and it is obvious that their creators often lack of any previous cartographic knowledge. Although there are several occassions when these visualizations are really useful, the presence of very poor solutions leaded to strong critical voices, even suggesting that there is no need of such thematic maps on virtual glo- bes at all (e.g. Harrower 2009). The author’s opinion is, however, that there are several pros and contras of putting our thematic maps to virtual globes, and it is advisable to take everything into account before taking sides. First of all it is important to clarify the aims of thematic maps. These maps always represent the spatial (and sometimes temporal) distribution of valu- e(s) or objects. Their main usage is to help quickly understanding spatial aspects and relations of various phenomena, therefore maybe their most