About three years ago, I posted about Penn State’s Digital Chart Of The World Server, which hosted old 1991/1992 VMAP0 world vector data from the National Geospatial Agency in E00 format. More recent data is available directly from the NGA, some of it in the higher-resolution VMAP1 dataset not available from Penn State, but the NGA data is in the uncommon VPF format that many GIS programs can’t handle. The Russian GIS Lab website has converted more recent VMAP0 and VMAP1 data into the more-commonly-used shapefile format, and made it openly available for download. You can get VMAP0 data for the whole world at this link, and the higher-resolution VMAP1 data for selected areas at this link.
While you can get similar and much fresher shapefile data for some of this info from the CloudMade OSM shapefile data site, and from the Natural Earth vector dataset, the VMAP0/VMAP1 files include data like railroads, utilities, cultural landmarks and others that can be difficult to track down.
Krystian Pietruszka emails about his new Geocontext Profiler site, based on the new Google Maps API version 3. Place two markers on a Google Maps view by clicking, and get the elevation profile between them:
You can add as many additional markers as you want in any direction; to fine-tune a marker position, just click and hold on it, and drag it to the desired spot. You have multiple options for the lines between points:
- Direct – Straight line between points
- Driving – Elevation along roads from point to point (like this preset example for Death Valley):
Click on the Geolocation IP link at right to jump to your local area; click on the double-arrow icon in the upper right corner to go to full-screen-width for the app (and back again). You can also link to a profile, or embed it on your site:
Note: The “Import KML” link in the upper left of the map will let you load and display KML data on the map, but doesn’t create an elevation profile between points or along a line.
Been a while since I last posted about Prune (version 6) (earlier posts about versions three and four), a GPS data manager, visualizer and photo geotagger. It’s Java-based, so it runs in Windows, Mac and Linux, not a common trait with GPS software. Just checked the website, and discoverd that Prune is at version 10 (!), and has progressively added features with every version. Current feature set (from the website) includes:
- Loading of coordinate data from file in any text-based format, with any combination of fields and any separator, or in GPX or KML or KMZ or NMEA format. Xml files can be zipped or gzipped.
- Loading of coordinate data from GPS receivers using gpsbabel.
- Top-down, zoomable, draggable view of data points including map images from Openstreetmap or any similar map tile server (eg opencyclemap, openpistemap).
- Caching of map tiles to disk for faster access and offline use.
- Altitude profile view or speed profile view.
- Selection of individual points and ranges to show details.
- Deletion of duplicates and variable compression of track.
- Deletion of selected points and ranges, and reversal of ranges.
- Editing of point data, and creation of waypoints.
- Re-ordering of waypoints within data set.
- Saving of data in specified text format, XML format (GPX, KML, KMZ) or sending to GPS receiver.
- Interactive 3d display of data.
- Export to POV format for rendering of 3d model by Povray.
- Loading of photos in jpeg format with or without coordinate data in exif tags.
- Connection of photos to points, and saving of coordinates in exif tags. (requires exiftool)
- Automatic correlation of photos with track points using each photo’s timestamp.
- Inclusion of photo thumbnails in KMZ export.
- Generation of charts (eg altitudes, speeds) either on screen or exported to SVG file.
- Launch of browser showing area in various map websites such as Google Maps or Openstreetmap.
- Multiple Undo.
- Multiple language support – currently EN (English), DE (German), DE_ch (Swiss German), ES (Spanish), FR (French), IT (Italian), PL (Polish), ZH (simplified Chinese), JA (Japanese) and Portuguese (PT) are supported. Turkish (TR), Romanian (RO), Indonesian (ID) and Afrikaans (AF) are partially supported.
Screenshot (with 3D track window open):
You’ll need to have Java installed on your system just to run the program. But full functionality requires download and installation of a number of needed software packages, as described on the “Dependencies” page; all are free and available for all OS platforms.
Stamen Design is a “design and technology studio in San Francisco”, with a definite bias towards data visualization in general, and maps in particular. Found out that I’ve already covered one of their projects before, the Walking Papers project which lets you add data to the OpenStreetMap project with paper maps. But just poking around their list of projects a bit, I found:
Continue reading ‘Map Projects From Stamen Design’
The Harvard Geospatial Library is:
A collection of 6,871 worldwide and regional geographic data layers, scanned historic maps and associated descriptive information that can be searched mapped and downloaded for use for use with your GIS software.
A significant fraction of the data layers are listed as “Restricted” (e.g. ESRI data), meaning they can only be used by Harvard staff and students. Still, there’s a fair amount of freely-distributable data available, although it’s a pretty mixed bag of stuff. My attempts to use the Basic and Advanced search functions usually yielded few to no hits; better to click on the “Map Browse” tab and then pan/zoom the map to your area of interest; you’ll then get a list of up to 1000 datasets that are relevant to that area:
Continue reading ‘Harvard Geospatial Library’
Both this site and KML-Circles appear to be down; try the GE Path program as an alternative.
Posted a long time ago about the KML-Circles site, which lets you generate polygons/quasi-circles centered around arbitratry points in KML format for Google Earth and Google Maps. Lots of options at that site, perhaps too many if you just want a simple circle. For that, there’s the very-stripped-down KML Circle Generator site. Enter the center point for the circle in lat/long, and either the desired radius in meters or a lat/long position you want the circle to pass through:
Press the Go button, and get a link to the KML file:
Depending on how your browser is set up, clicking on the link will either download it to your computer, or open it automatically in Google Earth. Right-clicking on the link and choose “Save As” is the safest, as it will definitely download the file to your computer. Open it in Google Earth:
Default is a red circle; if you don’t like that, you can always right-click on the KML file listing at left, choose Properties, and change the style to whatever you want:
BTW, that big hole in the ground inside the circle is Meteor Crater, just outside Winslow, AZ.
