Free Geography Tools

This is the final installment in my screencast series on MapWindow GIS. In addition to an easy-to-use shapefile editor, MapWindow has some advanced tools for combining, manipulating, and selecting from shapefile layers that aren’t all that common in freeware GIS software.

Among these are:

• Clip Shapefile With Polygon – Finds the intersection between two shapefile layers (“And” operation)
• Erase Shapefile With Polygon – Erases shapefile with another shapefile; useful for “Not” operation, or creating shapefiles with holes in the polygons
• Merge Shapes – Combine shapes in different layers (“Or” operation)
• Clip Polygon With Line – Split a polygon into two separate polygons using an arbitrarily-shaped line
• Buffer Shapes – Create a new polygon layer whose shapes are defined by shapes in another layer (point, line or polygon) plus a specifiable buffer distance
• Export Shapes To New Shapefile By Mask – Select shapes in one layer by using shapes in another; combine it with Buffer Shapes for spatial selection (e.g. buffer a city by 10 kilometers, then use that buffer layer and this tool to select all cities within 10 kilometers of the selected city)

Here’s a screencast that demonstrates some of these functions:

Related posts:

1. Intro To MapWindow GIS III – Shapefile Editing
2. Recap Of Intro To MapWindow GIS Series
3. Free ArcGIS Extensions For Municipal GIS Applications
4. Converting Raster Area Images Into Polygon Shapefiles
5. Online Google Earth Utilities For Buffering And Area Calculations
6. Free Toolsets for ArcGIS
7. Converting Google Earth KML Files To Shapefile Format
8. Intro To MapWindow GIS II – Shapefile Attribute Tables
9. Converting Text/Spreadsheet Data To Line/Area Shapefiles
10. Assigning Attributes From A Polygon Shapefile To Another Shapefile
11. Introduction To MapWindow GIS I – Shapefile Viewing
12. MapWindow GIS Version 4.4 Is Out
13. SAGA GIS 2.0 Released
14. Two Online Vector GIS/GPS/KML Conversion Utilities
15. Exporting Shapefiles To Google Earth IV – Shape2Earth