Friday, March 05, 2010

Kml2Shapefile for MapWindow GIS

Kml2Shapefile has been released as an open source KML/KMZ to shapefile converter. It is a plugin for the free MapWindow GIS. It needs a bit more testing. There are a lot of KML files out there.

I was going to provide the option to reproject the data, but decided the the user can do that easy enough in MapWindow after the shapefile has been created.

Kml2Shapefile will split the geometries out of KML into separate shapefiles (points, lines, polygons) and supports Z values and multipoints.

Currently, you can save the following as attributes:

  1. Placemark name
  2. Placemark snippet
  3. Placemark description
  4. Description HTML tables (needs more testing)
  5. Lat/Long of point data
  6. Elevation of point data
The ability to save custom schema's will come later. I thought it was best to get this our for testing.