Google Earth - misc items

[Kurt Wurm]

By private email I was asked about my mention of “zonums” in the other thread.   

 

Link -à  http://www.zonums.com/ 

 

Zonums Solutions provides some very functional, free software produced by a student at the University of Arizona.   My particular favorite is SHP2KML which converts shapefiles to keyhole markup language.   While it may take a few experiments to get it right, this is a very good conversion.     NGS Control – I separate my initial query at NGS into two (one for horizontal, 2^nd for vertical) as I eventually want two data themes with different symbols in GE.    I query typically for an entire county, select the “shapefile” as the format for your data.

 

Shp2kml offers several choices – many of these relate to field choices for labelling, data to include or excude as attributes.  Note these show up in GE in a white callout window as properties of the points … one field is a hyperlink – that is clickable to immediately retrieve the NGS datasheet.

 

~k

 

 

(has anyone other than me experimented with the web services stream of PLSS data into GE yet?)

[Milby]

> (has anyone other than me experimented with the web services stream of PLSS
> data into GE yet?)

I have Kurt. I saved as a KML and uploaded my implementation of the
BLM_MAP_PLSS? map service to the files area as PLSS MAP.KMZ for anyone
who would like to see it. As with Zonums solution, lots of options
and I'm still experimenting to see if there is something better than
what I stumbled on so far.

While I have posted a couple of implementations of the Zonums shp2kml
in the past, I also uploaded 2766.kmz to the files area as an example
of a more recent creation I made with it. This is a moderately
complex township and a good area to compare the two processes.
Combined with a passing knowledge of working with shape files (I use
ArcView 3.3) this can be an extremely powerful application. I
uploaded RAV NORTH.KMZ which is one example I've used in recent
presentations to PLSW which usually produces audible reactions from
the crowd.

A quick note regarding the KMZ extension. Because shp2kml carries
field data with it, it can result in rather large KML files. Because
a KML is basically a SGML text file, users can greatly reduce the size
of the file by zipping it. Change the ZIP extension to KMZ and GE
recognizes it as a ZIPped file and decompresses accordingly. Vice
versa to go from KMZ to a readable ascii file (change KMZ to ZIP and
unzip).