#EDITING KML IN QUANTUM GIS LICENSE#
#EDITING KML IN QUANTUM GIS PROFESSIONAL#

If I want to play around with the data a bit to see how it looks in Google Earth, I can select 'Load As Link'. I can simply save the KML to the hard drive, or I can save it and have it be automatically loaded into Google Earth. Once the parameters have been set, I can convert the data to KML. The color for each feature is determined by the symbology used in MapWindow GIS. Either a common number can be set that is applied to all features, or a numeric attibute field can be used. There are currently two ways to determine a height value for each feature. The Layer Name is the name that is visible in the table of contents in Google Earth, and the Layer Opacity determines to what degree you can see through the layer. Once I find a color I am happy with, I can access the Shapefile2KML tool from the menu bar.Īt this point in development, I have some pretty basic KML parameter options I can set. MapWindow GIS offers the basic coloring schemes that you would find in a typical GIS, such as coloring features by attribute. Once the data is in MapWindow GIS, I can make whatever symbolic changes I might want by accessing the layer properties. Now that my data is in the proper projection, I can go ahead and add it to Google Earth using MapWindow GIS. The new shapefile has the same name with “_Reprojected” tacked on the end (so, in this case, the school district shapefile I downloaded named “schldist” is re-projected to a new shapefile named “schldist_Reprojected”). The way that MapWindow GIS handles re-projecting data is to create a new shapefile and write it to the same directory as the shapefile that is being re-projected. Now that the shapefile knows what its projection system is, it can convert to WGS84 to be compatible with Google Earth using MapWindow GIS’s “Reproject a Shapefile” tool. We have one more step to go, however, as Google Earth has its own projection System. In this case, the web site points out that “All data sets are projected into the Texas State Plane Central NAD 83 survey feet coordinate system unless otherwise stated.” So we enter this in the “Choose Projection” form in MapWindow GIS. This shapefile has no projection information, but MapWindow GIS allows us to assign a projection to the shapefile. I’ll start at a web page for accessing GIS data for Austin, Texas (and the regional area) and downloading a shapefile representing School Districts. To get an idea of the status of this open source KML initiative (I will certainly have to come up with a better name than that), I thought I would walk through a typical scenario of taking a shapefile off of the internet and placing it in Google Earth. MapWindow GIS also lets users make shapefiles from scratch pretty quickly, though its editing tools are not as robust as OpenJump or QGIS (which I have often used for editing shapefiles to be converted in MapWindow GIS). The main reason for choosing this open source GIS was it’s development environment (.NET), the ease with which it was possible to create plugins, and its re-projecting capability (very important if you want to get all of your shapefiles into Google Earths projection system). To develop my Shapefile to KML tool, I decided to use MapWindow GIS. In fact, I have found that if you are willing to jump back and forth between each of them, you can do an enormous amount of serious GIS work. As you might expect, each of these has their strong and weak points. My personal favorites are OpenJUMP, Quantum GIS (QGIS), and MapWindow GIS.

#EDITING KML IN QUANTUM GIS PROFESSIONAL#

There are several good open source GIS packages available today, and while none of them come close to matching a professional GIS, quite a few of them are powerful enough to be useful.

I also really like the idea of having my own, royalty free, toolset for creating Google Earth based applications.

#EDITING KML IN QUANTUM GIS LICENSE#

There is a massive amount of GIS data available to the public in the form of shapefiles, and a cheap, license free, toolset to get the data into Google Earth might be useful to a lot of people. 1) It sounded like a lot of fun, 2) I have been increasingly interested in open source GIS, and 3) the emergence of Google Earth (as well as Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and Microsoft Live Local) has led to an enormous interest in geospatial visualization outside of the traditional GIS community. There were three main reasons that I decided to work on this project. I gained a lot of experience with KML while prototyping an ESRI ArcMap based toolset that used ArcObjects, and thought that an open source equivalent would be worth pursuing. whenever I get the chance) is a Shapefile to KML writer for viewing GIS data in Google Earth that uses open source GIS components. One of the things that I have been working on lately (or.

Editing kml in quantum gis