Map the Fallen, a Google Earth map released yesterday for Memorial Day, is an impressive piece of work. It maps the approximate locations of the deaths of coalition soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and links each one to that soldier’s hometown. It uses data from icasualties.org to populate the map.

Unfortunately, either some of the data on icasualties.org isn’t formatted properly or there’s something wrong with Sean Askay’s data scraper. Many of the Canadian casualties are missing from the Afghanistan map. Because female soldiers are given a different colour, the absence of Capt. Nichola Goddard, Canada’s first female combat soldier killed on the front lines, is especially conspicuous.

Cpt. Nichola Goddard's entry in Map the Fallen

In fact, her entry in Map the Fallen contains several errors. Her last name is given as “MSM,” which is actually a title indicating that Goddard was posthumously given the Meritorious Service Medal. Her hometown is given as “Calgary, Nova Scotia,” she is reported to have died in “Not reported yet, Afghanistan,” and the circumstances of her death aren’t given.

I’ve been working on a database of Canadian soldiers for years now. Here’s Capt. Goddard’s entry in the CBCNews.ca database, and here’s the approximate location of her death. That map of Canadian casualties in Afghanistan was my baby for a while, but it hasn’t been updated for nearly a year, for various technical and editorial reasons.

I’m planning an update to the database this summer that will include some map data.