Just got an email from Zonums Software that, after a prolonged hiatus, they’ve resumed development of free stand-alone and web-based geographic tools. I’ve posted previously on their stand-alone KML to shapefile converter, but a glance through that post’s comments will reveal that it has some serious bugs in it. While those are still being fixed, Zonums has released an online KML to shapefile converter:
Archive for February, 2009
Since Tuesday’s post listing 1:24K-equivalent topo maps for Garmin GPS units, covering 20 new states, three more states are up at the GPS File Depot:
Also up is a link to a site with Garmin topo maps for Mexico; 100-meter contours only, no roads or other info. No installer, just the raw .img files; you’ll need a program like MapSet Toolkit to install these in MapSource.
Addendum: Florida, too.
Not too long ago, I posted about DS World, a Windows app that lets you query a database of National Geodetic Survey markers, and returns a KML file to display them in Google Earth (note: earlier versions of DS World may have problems with Google Earth 5, but the newest one works fine). In comments, the survey firm of Metzger and Willard noted that they’ve created a web app called NGS Control Stations (NGSCS) Radial Search that performs a similar function. Despite the name, it allows search by three different areal selection methods:
Since my last update on free 1:24K-equivalent topo maps for Garmin GPS units from GPSFileDepot, there’s been a huge explosion in the number of states covered:
- Southeast US: Covering all of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee; parts of Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, and Virginia
- South-Central US: All of New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas; parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri
- Southwest US: Covering all of Arizona, parts of CA, UT, and NV
- Illinois: The entire state
- New England: A combination of mapsets previously available separately for MA, ME, VT, NH
- Montana Landowner Topo: The whole state, with special colors identifying landowners
- New Jersey: Entire state
- New York: Entire state
- Ohio: Entire state
- Washington: Entire state
- West Virginia: Entire state
Windows installers available for all, Mac for many. Part of the reason for this flurry of activity may be that Dan Bloomberg, webmaster for the site and creator of most of the older maps, has released a new tool called Topo Process that simplifies the process of obtaining and processing the data necessary to create these topo maps. While the official Garmin 1:24K topo maps have more features, like elevation profiles, routing, and shading in supported units, much more of the US is covered by these free maps than is currently available from Garmin. And you can’t beat the price.
In addition to the topo maps, a browse through the Custom Maps directory will bring up lots of other specialty maps and data, like trails, POIs, and even raster maps for a few areas like Joshua Tree National Park.
MapChannels (covered several times before on this blog) has announced version 3 of their embeddable Google Maps data tools. New features include:
• Restructuring of the design process
• User-definable dictionaries to present maps in any language
• Support for spreadsheet data in either tab-delimited format or from Google Spreadsheets
• Support for GeoRSS feeds using the Google Feeds API
• Marker clustering to display large numbers of markers on a map
• Google Street View
• Microsoft Virtual Earth
I’ve played with a bit, and it is easier to use than Version 2 (which is still available). Especially nice is the Google Spreadsheet feature; while Google had a “wizard” that walked you through one way of doing this before, the MapChannels method is far easier to use, and the ability to add GeoRSS feeds and other data makes it more powerful.
You know GIS has hit the big time when it gets its own “Dummies” book:
The author, Michael DeMers, is a professor of geography at New Mexico State University, and the author of the textbook Fundamentals Of Geographical Information Systems:
I ordered a copy of GIS For Dummies today, and plan to have a review up on this blog soon.
Got an email question about how to create point grids in GIS format with free software, and the off-the-top-of-my-head solution was fGIS. fGIS (Forestry GIS) is a decent freeware GIS developed by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources using the TatukGIS Developer Kernel. Up until late 2005, updated versions were being released regularly as freeware, but a change in the Kernel licensing conditions made that impossible for future versions. The last free version is still available, but is not guaranteed to be bug-free and will never be fixed or updated. Still, it has some useful utilities, including the “Generate Cruise Points” tool, available from the Utilities menu; this tool lets you create random and regularly-spaced point shapefiles for a defined area.
Start up fGIS, and you’ll be asked to define a project name right away. The coordinate system will be defined by the first layer you add, either raster or vector, and whatever data layers you add to the program must be in the same coordinate system. The program supports many different formats, vector and raster, including shapefile and GeoTiff. You’ll need to have the area you want gridded defined by a vector layer, either one you open or one you create using the program’s vector editing functions; e.g. you could open a raster GeoTiff, then draw a polygon defining the area you want gridded on top of the raster image. You also need to highlight the polygon area you want to have gridded using the “Pick” tool (the red arrow icon at the top):
Then select Utilities => Generate Cruise Points:
Here, new.shp is the polygon shapefile with the highlighted area to be gridded; specify the output grid point shapefile by clicking on the “Output Shapefile” button (entering the directory in the box at right has no effect). Then choose either a random grid and the number of random points, or a systematic grid with the desired spacing and units. Click OK, and the grid shapefile will be created and added to the map view; if the area is large, and the spacing is small, this may take a while. Here’s that grid shapefile plotted on top of the original raster (zoomed in very close):
With software like DNRGarmin, you could upload such a grid to your GPS as a set of sampling points.
Making Maps posts about HistCarto, a site with 4000 searchable and viewable historic maps of France, dating from the 17th to 19th centuries. The site is in French, so you may want to have Google Translator handy if you don’t speak the language. But for a quick view of some of the maps:
- Click on the “Acces a la base” link at the right to go to the database page
- Click on “Recherche” (Search) at left, then “Simple”
- Click on the “Type de carte” (type of map) dropdown, then choose a type of map you’d like to see; many types will be obvious to many non-French speakers. In the example below, I’ve select “Geologie”, which oddly enough is geology:
- Other search options are “Mot(s) du titre” – words in the title; “Auteur” – author; “Lieu de conservation” – source of the map; “Aire geographique” – geographic area; “Technique” – whether the map is a printed map (“Carte imprimee annotee” or hand-drawn (“Carte manuscrite”). Caveat: my high school French is a bit rusty :).
- Click on “Rechercher” to retrieve a list of maps of that type:
- Click on a listing to retrieve the info page for that map; click on the map image at the bottom of the info page to bring up a pop-up Flash Zoomify viewer with the map loaded:
Note: The map is of a region in France, but was created in Germany, hence some of the German names.
No downloadable versions of the maps, unfortunately.
