There’s lots of cool and useful geographic data being produced in Google Earth’s native KML file format these days. But there’s also lots of geographic data available online in the standard shapefile format, compatible with most GIS software. Extensions to ArcGIS, like Brian Flood’s Arc2Earth ($99/$299) and Valery Hronusov’s KMLer ($20/$35/$50), can create KML files from ArcGIS data, but these are not only expensive but require that you have ArcGIS 9 or higher installed, a program that lists for $1500. It would be nice if there were cheaper alternatives, and there are.
Continue reading ‘Exporting Shapefiles To Google Earth I – Quick And Simple’
Shapefiles are the most common format for GIS vector data, and just about every GIS program, free or commercial, can open them. Unfortunately, older vector data is often in the ArcINFO interchange E00 format which, unlike shapefiles, isn’t a well-documented format. Many free GIS programs can’t open E00 files at all, and even those few that can often have problems handling them correctly. But there’s a fairly simple two-stage process that can accurately convert vector E00 files into shapefile format.
Continue reading ‘Converting E00 Vector Data To Shapefiles – A Free And Fairly Painless Approach’
There are hundreds of Web 2.0 sites out there, and while many are potentially interesting and useful, finding the right one can be a pain. TechCrunch has a post this morning about Go2Web20.net, a site devoted to tracking and tagging Web 2.0 sites. Its Flash interface (occasionally flaky) lets you search for a Web 2.0 site by keyword, or by using a tag cloud.
What’s the geographical connection? They have tags for “Mapping” and “GPS”. But it’s worth poking around just to see what’s out there and available – I especially recommend looking at the “Collaboration” tag for interesting ways to work cooperatively on projects over the Internet.
Now that I’ve *finally* finished the series on how to meet or beat most of Google Earth Plus’s features without paying for it, here’s a one-post set of links to all the posts in the series.
Brief summary of what features Google Earth Plus has, and which ones there are free solutions for.
Importing GPS data into Google Earth using standard GPX files, proprietary GPS unit software, and EasyGPS.
How to use GPSBabel and GPS Visualizer to download GPS data, and convert GPX and other GPS data formats into Google Earth KML format.
Exporting point and line data out of Google Earth and into a GPS unit, something Google Earth Plus doesn’t offer as a special feature.
Another “free” program with the ability to import and export GPS data to and from Google Earth.
Google Earth Plus lets you import up to 100 coordinate points in CSV format; free options allow unlimited import.
A simple Excel spreadsheet that can take up to 50,000 sets of coordinates, name and description data, and convert it to a KML file.
As part of the spreadsheet import, Google Earth Plus will let you geocode 100 addresses, but free options let you geocode thousands of addresses per day.
A post about GPS TrackMaker, totally free software for GPS export/import to Google Earth, file conversion, track editing and more.
A link to the DestinSharks.com description of Google Earth Voyager, a free program for automated caching of Google Earth data for offline use. Caching Google Earth data is necessary if you’re going to be doing real-time GPS tracking with Google Earth when you don’t have an Internet connection.
The final set of posts, dealing with how to implement real-time GPS tracking in Google Earth with free or cheap options.
And check the series listing at the bottom for more recent updates.
If you plan to do real-time GPS tracking with Google Earth, and you won’t have Internet access while doing so, you’ll need to have data for the area you’ll be doing your tracking in cached on your hard drive by Google Earth. You can do this manually by “visiting” the area in question in Google Earth while you’re connected to the Internet, but DestinSharks.com has a post on Google Earth Voyager, a free program that automates that process. Edit: Thanks to Yousuf in the comments for this download link at Download.com.
As a wrap-up to the “Google Earth Plus features for free” series, I’ll briefly comment on the three paid (albeit cheap) options for doing real-time GPS tracking with the free version of Google Earth.
Franson GPSGate Google Earth plug-in
I mentioned GPSGate in an earlier post – it converts a Garmin USB connection to an NMEA equivalent, and also splits a single NMEA connection into multiple serial connections, so that more than one program can receive data from your GPS at the same time. If you buy the Express edition of GPSGate (only two connections) for $9.95, or the Standard edition (unlimited connections) for $29.95, you can also download and install a free plug-in that lets you do real-time GPS tracking with Google Earth. Haven’t tried it, so can’t really comment on it, but from the screenshots and description it looks pretty good.
EarthTracker
EarthTracker will run for a few minutes, then timeout; you then have to re-start it. Registration for $10 stops the timeouts. The feature set looks pretty decent: supports NMEA and Garmin USB, fleet tracking then Supports Garmin USB connection, fleet tracking, comes with a data converter. But I was unable to get it to work correctly; with an NMEA connection, Google Earth opens and displays a position marker briefly before shutting down spontaneously; I suspect that one of the Google Earth API revisions broke it. And the Garmin USB connection didn’t work at all. But give it a shot – it might work for you. Comes with a PDF manual.
GETrax
GETrax has a 30-day free trial period, then requires $9.95 registration. Comes with a wide-variety of features, including APRS support, sending data to Google Maps, file conversion, etc., and worked fine on my system. Comes with a decent help file as well. Don’t know that I’d choose it over EarthBridge, but at least worth checking out in 30-day demo mode. DestinSharks has a review of this program, along with reviews of GooPs, EarthBridge, and Google Earth Plus.
After my last Google Maps posts, Rich of GPS TrackLog wrote to let me know that there’s a way to convert Google Maps search results (restaurants, Wi-Fi hotspots, etc.) to a GPX file for upload to a GPS. He’s already got a full write-up on the procedure, so I’ll just link to that. Unfortunately, the process doesn’t work with the DigiPoint site, but it appears as though that site’s author is planning direct GPX support in the future. And you can always use the options described in the post to convert the text output to GPX.
Geocoding is the assignment of geographic coordinates to a location, typically one identified by name or address. I’ve covered address geocoding in an earlier post, in connection with converting US addresses to points in a KML file for use in Google Earth. Reverse address geocoding refers to finding the address closest to a set of geographic coordinates, and I’ve found a website/webservice that will do this for US addresses.
Continue reading ‘Reverse Address Geocoding With Google Maps’
