Shapefiles for Web Mapping

KML is becoming a standard way to display geospatial data on the internet. With all of the really good web mapping platforms available today, you can take your pick on how you would like to show off your GIS data to a large audience.

Shape2Earth can get your GIS data on the web quickly by converting your shapefiles to KML for display in Google Earth, Google Maps, or Bing Maps.

Here is a quick example of showing off GIS data in Google's App Engine platform with Google Earth. It's important to note that this capability is essentially free. Google will host your spatial application. All you have to do is put it together.

Shapefiles in in Google's App Engine (select the Shape2Earth layers on the right).

KML for Web Mapping

Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is starting to become a de facto standard for transmitting spatial data. Both Google Maps and Microsoft's Virtual Earth have added support for viewing KML data. In both of these cases, it is necessary to make the KML file available on the web so that Google and/or Microsoft can access the file and process it to be viewed in their map controls.

Google Map's, as you might imagine, is getting much better at displaying KML on their web map. The example below shows a KML file (created by Shape2Earth) showing the total number of households by state.

First in Google Map:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://shape2earth.com/Documents/states_NumHouseholds.kml

Then in Virtual Earth.

http://maps.live.com/?mapurl=http://shape2earth.com/Documents/states_NumHouseholds.kml

Note how the geometries in Virtual Earth do not line up very well, and in some cases, are not visible at all. Virtual Earth also seems to automatically add a center point, and does not adhere to the KML coloring scheme. If you switch to 3D mode, the geometries will line up much better, but the fill color seems to be absent.

It looks like any investments that you might be making in KML converters are going to be beneficial for some time to come.

Publish Your Own Google Map Without a Server

If you would like to publish your own Google Map, but do not have a server to place it on, there are some greate options to get you started without needing a server.

I ran across this web page recently that has a number of excellent tutorials for using Google's Page Creator. The Google Pages site is fantastic for putting together really quick and easy web pages. It also will let's you publish your own Google Maps Web Page using the this tutorial.

I used this tutorial to put together my own sample Google Map. This is pretty basic, but could be spiced up quite a bit with added funtionality.