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Archive for October, 2007

Free Blank/Colored Map Graphics

Published at October 31, 2007 in cartography. 1 Comment


The “blank map, world map” site (sic) has lots of map graphics in GIF, EPS and PDF formats, under the Creative Commons license so they’re free to use. World and continent maps are available (multiple projections for world maps) blank/uncolored, with and without borders; country maps are available with and without borders and subdivision names.

Perhaps the most unique application is an online paintable world map that lets you color in countries with your choice of colors, and then export the graphic file in PNG format in sizes from small (200 x 132 pixels) to large (6000 x 3973):

printableworldmap

Click on a country or countries to select, then select the color you want to use for them (note: you need to de-select the country or countries you’ve just colored by clicking on them before coloring the next set). Useful for creating wildly-inappropriate coloring schemes:

world_mapa



KML Random Placemark Generator

Published at October 30, 2007 in Google Earth and KML. 0 Comments


To go along with its new KML grid creator, Zonums Software also has a new web app that generates a randomly-distributed set of placemarks in KML for use in Google Earth and other compatible apps. Enter latitude/longitude limits for the area along with the number of points and other parameters in the web form:

randomKMLform

Click on “Generate Points”, and get a Google Maps view of the random points:

randomGoogleMaps PM

Click on “Download KML File”, and the KML code is generated and displayed in the browser. Save the page as a KML file, and you can open it in Google Earth:

randompointsGE

Randomly-distributed points are often used for statistical sampling purposes. While KML may not be the ideal format for that application, this is at least a convenient way to generate them. If you need them in a more conventional GIS format (like a shapefile), you can use Zonum’s kml2shp application to convert the random KML points into a random point shapefile.



MGRS/UTM/Latitude-Longitude Converter

Published at October 29, 2007 in Google Earth and coordinate conversion. 0 Comments


For converting to and from the Military Grid Reference System (MGRS) and UTM/LatLong, the MGRS Conversion Utility is a small utility (365kB download) which does only that. During installation, everything stops for a long while, but it’s not a crash - it will eventually complete the installation process. Once installed and run, just enter one of three kinds of coordinates, UTM, latitude/longitude, or MGRS, click Enter next to the entered coordinates, and they will be converted to the other two coordinate systems:

mgrs

You can choose from 61 different datums in the “Ellipsoid” section at top. Latitude/longitude can be entered in decimal degrees, or as degree-minute-second with each set of numbers separated by a space. Set the MGRS precision with the up/down arrows; check “Use Bessel Code” for those areas where it’s appropriate for MGRS (mainly Europe - see the help file for more info).

And if you’re interested in displaying MGRS coordinate data in Google Earth, the Nearby.org.uk website has a link that plots MGRS gridlines in Google Earth, with a central marker that displays the 1-meter MGRS reference.

Addendum: See this post for a roundup of MGRS utilities. 



Google Earth PhotoOverlay Tool

Published at October 25, 2007 in Google Earth and KML. 0 Comments

Brand-spanking new from the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) comes the Google Earth Photo Overlay Creator, a free program to aid in creating PhotoOverlays, photographic images you can embed into Google Earth to correspond to the actual view. While you can do this to a limited degree from Google Earth, and can also do it directly in KML, the GE Photo Overlay Creator simplifies the job tremendously. It also lets you “tile” a large image, similar to tiled Ground Overlays, so that it loads in only the image information necessary for that particular view. This reduces both the bandwidth and computational requirements, particularly for large images.

The program is Java, and will run in Windows, Macintosh and Linux (check the readme.txt file for info; see this Digital Urban post for a full instructional tutorial). Full support of all image formats requires that you have Java Advanced Imaging installed.

Via Digital Urban blog.

Added 11/6/07: The Google Earth Blog links to another tutorial on this tool at GELessons.



Grid Creation And Path/Polygon Measurements: Two New Online KML Tools

Published at October 25, 2007 in Google Earth and KML. 1 Comment

KML-GRID: Creates a point, line or filled polygon grid in KML. Set the desired parameters:

KMLGrid1

Clicking on “Data Fill Example” enters sample data into the boxes. For Grid Origin, it’s decimal latitude/longitude. For Increment/Decrement, it’s currently also decimal degrees, as the “Length Units” drop-down at top is currently limited to those units (wouldn’t surprise me if additional unit options were added soon). Click on “Create GRID”, and a view of the grid is shown in Google Maps (lines in this case):

10-24-2007-2.20.39 PM

Click on the “Download KML File” button, and the KML code will appear in your browser; either choose “Save As” from the File menu, or copy and paste it into a text editor and save it as a KML file there. Open it in Google Earth, and there’s your grid:

kmlgrid

A useful complement to GE-Path for creating KML grids.
KML - Area & Length: I’ve covered some other utilities that will calculate path lengths from KML code, filling in a gap in Google Earth. This new utility calculates not just path lengths, but areas as well. Paste the KML code into the text box:

kmllengtharea

For KML files that have both paths and polygons, you can calculate just the path lengths, just the areas, or both; set the units and the delimiters at top. When you click on “Process data”, you’ll get back a text window with the IDs and lengths/areas of the features in the KML file, separated on each line by the chosen delimiter. e.g. for the grid file above:

kmllengthresults



KML Time Embedder Improved With Hour-Minute-Second Ability

Published at October 24, 2007 in Google Earth and KML. 0 Comments

I posted a while back about a small utility I wrote called KML Time Embedder, which lets you embed TimeSpan or TimeStamp data into a KML file for use in Google Earth time animations. That version only allowed year-month-day times, but I said that if enough people asked, I’d add the ability to stamp with hour-minute-second in addition to year-month-day. Thanks to popular demand (two people), I’ve modified the program to include that capability.

If you haven’t already read posts one and two on this utility, the following won’t make much sense.

In the upper-right, above the checkbox to enable timezones, is a new one to enable setting the time of day for each date:

enabletimeset

Check that box, and setting the timezone is automatically enabled (and can’t be turned off). Set your local time zone relative to UTC (Greenwich Mean Time) using the dropdown at right.

With that box checked, timeset boxes will appear to the right of the date set inputs:

timeinputs

These will only become enabled for input after you’ve selected a day, and are set for 24-hour time (e.g. 2:17 PM is 14:17:00). As before, if you’re in TimeSpan mode and want it to run from the beginning time to the present, just leave the end of the timespan section blank. Click on Verify Dates to make sure they’re what you want. The program does check to see if the dates and times are valid, but I’m not 100% sure I’ve made that foolproof, so you should check them manually:

sampledatetime

If they’re what you want, click on the “Embed Time Information” button, and the output file will be written with both date and hour of day information.

If you’ve already downloaded and installed the KML Time Embedder, you can just download this small executable file (about 20 KB) and unzip it into the program directory. For that matter, the executable by itself should work fine for most people. If it doesn’t, you can download the full install program (2 MB) which now contains the updated executable.

Other free utilities can be found on the Utilities page. If you find this or any of my other utilities particularly useful and would like to show your appreciation, donations of any amount are gratefully accepted via PayPal.




One More Color Design Resource

Published at October 23, 2007 in cartography. 0 Comments

In comments on a previous post, Igor Asselbergs points to a page on Using Color In Information Graphics from the NASA/Ames Color Research Lab. In addition to a very large collection of articles/tutorials on effective (and ineffective) uses of color in representing information graphically, there’s also a Java-based Color Tool:

Color_Tool

“The Color Tool is designed to provide the designer with views of the perceptual relationships among the possible color choices. It improves on previous tools by more clearly representing the constraints imposed by the physical display and the structure of human color vision. This should help the designer manage the luminance contrasts of symbol and background colors by showing the tradeoffs in hue and saturation.” - from the website. One nice feature is the ability to change the background luminosity, and see how that affects the perception of the various colors.

Thanks, Igor!



Shapefile To KML Converter shp2kml Updated To Version 2.0.

Published at October 23, 2007 in Google Earth and shapefile. 1 Comment

The older version of shp2kml, a full-featured stand-alone shapefile to KML converter, expired not too long ago, but version 2.0 is now out. Not any substantial changes in functionality from earlier versions, which pretty much had most of the functionality you might want, but it seems to handle some problematical large shapefiles better than it used to.

Addendum: The Virtual Earth blog reviews using the program, and importing the results into a Live Search Maps Collection .



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