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Archive for May, 2010

TopOSM – An Open Street Map Based Topographic Map

I’ve been checking in on Lars Ahlzen’s TopOSM site occasionally for a while now; he’s had a web-based map server with really nice Open-Street-Map-based topographic maps for Massachusetts and Colorado for a while now, but there hadn’t been any new additions for a while. Via the Mapperz blog, I see that there’s been a major addition in the past few months, with data added for the Western US (California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington). These are really nice-looking maps, with relief-shaded terrain, contour lines and road/trail data from the OSM project; starting view is centered around San Francisco:

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Convert An Excel Address Spreadsheet Into A KML File (And Then Into A Geocoded CSV Text File) With KMLGeocode And KMLReport

KMLGeocode (full UTK download page here) takes an address file in Excel (or XML) format, and creates a Google Earth KML file that plots geocodable addresses in the correct position. Load an address XLS file into the program (like this sample data also available on the download page):

KMLGeocode

You have to specify the column names that contain the key address fields required for geocoding, as well as the output KML filename. Once done, create the KML output file and open it in Google Earth. Addresses that could be geocoded will be plotted with orange pushpins:

geocoderesults

Clicking on  pushpin will bring up all the data fields for a record in the spreadsheet, not just the specified ones. Addresses that couldn’t be geocoded are given yellow pushpin designations, and will either show up plotted in a general location, or not plotted at all in Google Earth (though they will be listed in the Place pane under the KML file listing:

geocodeplaces

To embed the actual geographic coordinates for each of these addresses, right-click on the KML file listing (people.kml in the above example), and save it as another KML file with a different name. You can now open this different KML file in the KML Geocode Report program:

geocodereport

Specify the name of a text output file; this output will be a spreadsheet-readable CSV file that contains the original spreadsheet data with the longitude and latitude of geocodable addresses appended at the end as X and Y coordinates:

ID,Name,Group,Street,Street2,City,State,Zip,Phone,Email,X,Y
 11, Suzanne White, Office of Information Resources, 312 8th Ave North, Suite 1600, Nashville, TN, 37243, 615-253-4799, suzanne.white@state.tn.us,-86.784031,36.164133
 12, Kurt Snider, US Fish and Wildlife Service, 446 Neal St, , Cookeville, TN, 38501, 931-528-6481, kurt_snider@fws.gov,-85.497903,36.138056
 14, David Tirpak, Comptroller of the Treasury, 505 Deaderick St, Suite 1700, Nashville, TN, 37243-0277, 615-401-7820, david.tirpak@state.tn.us,-86.781603,36.165238

The “UnMatched” file is supposed to contain the non-geocodable addresses in KML format (at least, according to the PDF manual for these programs), but it didn’t show up for the sample data when I tried it. When you “Process” the files, in addition to the output file above, you’ll get a pop-up telling you the overall geocoding success percentage:

matchpercent

Note: When installing both programs, the installation directory is listed simply as “C:\Program Files\”; however, unless you specify the new name, it is installed in the directory “C:\Program Files\BRalston”, and “BRalston” is the folder in the Start Menu where you’ll find the program shortcut icons.




ArcGIS.Com Goes Into Beta

Lots of post on numerous blogs in the past few days about ESRI’s ArcGIS.com site coming online in beta format. From the help file:

  • Tools for building interactive maps
  • Maps and applications from the Web and GIS communities
  • Basemaps and specialty layers from ESRI
  • Developer resources for building Web mapping applications
  • Storage space for your map and application resources
  • Communities for sharing geographic information
  • Easy-to-use search for quickly finding what you want
  • Ranking and rating system for shared maps and applications

Requires an ESRI Global Account to save maps and upload data (free); even if you have a GA, you may have to register for a new one, as it wouldn’t take my old account info. Creating a basic map is pretty simple – choose a background map and a data layer:

kygeology

In my ignorance, I was hoping for a full free online GIS experience, like the GISCloud app I posted about a few weeks ago, and this isn’t it. For online data sources, you’re limited to either ArcGIS Server, Web mapping services, or mobile apps. For your own data, you’re limited to data packages created by ArcGIS products, like map packages (mpk) or layer packages (lpk). If you don’t have ArcGIS, you’re out of luck – no raw data files like shapefiles or raster imagery accepted as content. That isn’t a slam – it just means that I’m not the intended target, an ESRI product owner who wants to develop web/mobile mapping sites and applications. If you are, this site is very definitely worth exploring. Of note for app developers, there are APIs for Javascript, Flex, Silverlight, iPhone and Windows Mobile. For more info, I’d recommend a listen to the latest Very Spatial podcast; they have an interview with Bern Szukalski of ESRI about ArcGIS.com.

Addendum: James Fee has a far more comprehensive (and knowledgeable) overview than mine.




Short Hiatus

Taking a short break for medical reasons; posting should resume later this week, or early next.




Radical Cartography

Via the Kelly Lab Blog: Radical Cartography has a terrific set of maps covering a wide variety of unusual topics and visualizations. These are just “thumbnails”; larger versions are available at the site:

Federal land in the US:

federalland

Counties named after US Presidents:

presidential_sm

How the US would look in the Mercator projection if it were located at different latitudes and longitudes:

wandering_merc_sm

… and lots more – browse away!




Basic Postscript And Illustrator Country Maps With Planiglobe

Planiglobe lets you select a country or world region, and then download a Postscript or Adobe Illustrator file with that data:

planiglobe

You have some control over layers displayed, though not that much:

planiglobelayers

Note that  you check a box to *not* show a layer; this really needs to be fixed. You should also make sure that pop-ups are enabled for this site, and be prepared to click a link several times to get it to work. I couldn’t get the “add places” function to work; this supposedly lets you add your own points to a map. It also appears as though the map is in geographic projection (Plate Carree), which introduces major distortions in shape even at the country level; I’d like to see this changed to Mercator.

But hey, it’s in beta, so I’m guessing it will get better. If you need vector maps in SVG or WMF format, D-Maps is a better choice, but if you need them in PS or AI format, you might give this a try.




GISCloud – An Online Geographic Information System Application

I’ve been playing around a bit with GISCloud, a web-based GIS program. Looks interesting, and promising, but still has serious limitations. Feature set includes:

  • Raster and vector data display
  • Vector layer import and editing, including shapefiles, MapInfo, KML, tab-delimited and GPX
  • Built-in datafile coordinate reprojection; recognizes prj files, and lets you select the output coordinate system (including the one for your current project)
  • Advanced GIS analysis tools, including buffering, spatial selection by analysis, layer comparison (e.g. intersection), and area calculations.
  • Export vector data layers in shapefile, MapInfo, CSV or KML; this makes it a handy online format converter.
  • Share map editing with other users (or just publish it for viewing)
  • Easy-to-decode classic-looking GIS interface:

GISCloud

On the downside:

  • Only data layers imported into or through a PostGIS connection can be used for analysis and editing. I’m not up on PostGIS so I couldn’t test these functions, and none of the data sample sets have PostGIS data, either. You can apparently upload data and import it into a PostGIS database, though.
  • Uploading files can take a while (though they’re saved locally); GISCloud recognizes files in compressed archives, so you’re best off zipping up your data before you upload it.
  • For PostGIS data, I suspect that upload times are going to limit the size of the vector/database layers you can use.
  • Apparently no thematic (attribute-based) display colors yet; this is a major drawback.
  • Raster imagery updates during zooms can be slow.
  • Not all raster image types supported (e.g. 8-bit indexed GeoTiffs don’t work, 24-bit do).
  • It’s not exactly the zippiest GIS platform I’ve ever worked with.
  • It’s Flash-based, so Flash haters and iPad users should avoid, and everyone should expect CPU/performance/crashing issues. Flash 10.1 is supposed to be out soon, and supposedly will address some of those problems.

An interesting early effort in cloud-based GIS, and I’ll be watching its development. But unless you have access to, and/or experience with, PostGIS, of limited utility for now. And I don’t expect to see cloud-based GIS replacing dedicated GIS programs any time in the near future – too slow, and too limited.




Draw GPX Data Directly On Web Maps Using The GPS Visualizer Freehand Drawing Tool

I’ve posted recently about ScribbleMaps and ScribbleMaps Pro, web apps that let you draw features on a number of web maps (like Google Maps, OSM, and ESRI), and export the data in GPX format for upload to a GPS. Stopped by the GPS Visualizer website the other day, and just noticed that they have a similar application now, the GPS Visualizer Freehand Drawing Tool. On the down side, it doesn’t have nearly as many tools, editing options and output options as ScribbleMaps; on the plus side, because it doesn’t have a large number of tools and options, it’s easy and intuitive to use. And in addition to Google Maps and OSM Maps, it offers a number of background map options that ScribbleMaps doesn’t:

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