ian c. bryson
geomatics . ecology . design . . .Archive for Google
Creating Google Maps KML using EditGrid
The online spreadsheet service EditGrid allows users to easily generate kml features in google maps. Currently, the Grid2Map addon which enables this function only supports the creation of point or line features. It would also be nice if there was an option to plot polygon features as well.
The ability to link online spreadsheets to web mapping hints at more sophisticated GIS capabilities waaaaay down the line. The ability to attached (multiple) attributes in tabular form is the essence of vector based GIS.
Heres an example:
The EditGrid spreadsheet containing a few points, and the resulting Google Map with points only, and with points and lines.
The formatting is rather crude, but bearing in mind that this took approx 5 minutes, not too bad. A rather nice and user friendly way of generating some points/lines in Gmaps.
Cool.
Viewing ESRI Shapefiles in Google Maps
The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) has developed some free software gadgetry implementing the google maps API. ‘Google Map Creator‘ allows a user to perform thematic mapping from ESRI shapefile based data within google maps. The software magically spits out a html containing a default map layout, which can be customized to your liking. One limitation, however is it’s ability to only display a single thematic layer.
CASA has also developed another neat application for tiling large (in their example, non-spatial) images, called “Google Maps Image Cutter‘. The example is worth checking out! Seems Gmaps can do more than just maps!
