Nick Rabinowitz, a Grad student at UC Berkeley School of Information, posted an interesting announcement on the Google Geo Developer blog this morning. Google TimeMap is a Javascript API for working with geo-temporal data.  It combines Google Maps with the excellent SIMILE Timeline and wraps them into a single API. The library supports both JSON and KML data.

The example above shows the lifespans and geographical locations of major figures of the Renaissance. Click through the image to see it in action.