Showing posts with label shpescape. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shpescape. Show all posts

Saturday, 30 April 2011

Google Fusion Tables

A short post today about the wonderful Google Fusion Tables. It may sound baffling, but Fusion Tables are basically a service (provided by Google, obviously) that allows you to manage and map large databases 'in the cloud', as they say. In plain speak, you can upload large tables of data and display them and map them and share them. For someone like me who is into mapping data, this is great because all you need to do is get your data into kml format. This can be done with normal GIS software like ArcGIS but the best way I have found is to use shpescape.



The example above is just something I created a couple of years ago in ArcGIS and then recently uploaded to Fusion Tables. It's a 'tile finder' for Ordnance Survey data so you can figure out which 20km tile you need to get based on which area you are interested in. This is not the point here though - I'm just showing how you can get data into google map format very easily.

If you work with lots of data on a regular basis - and particularly any mappable data - you should take a look at Fusion Tables...

Sunday, 3 April 2011

Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation 2009 - Google Map

Recently I've been experimenting with google fusion tables and the mapping and database opportunities they present. One dataset I used for this was the new English Indices of Deprivation for 2010 - something the Guardian picked up. This was only really a quick experiment (literally done over an hour or so) but I was impressed with the capabilities.

Since, I'm from Scotland I also did a Scottish version - click the image below to go to the test site. Again, this is only experimental but I find it useful for exploring the data in an easy to use manner.



Technical note: this also led me to discover the amazing shpescape aka Shape to Fusion for converting shapefiles to fusion format - code which was written by Josh Livni at google. Enough nerdspeak for now.