KML Cruncher
- Created by
- Space-Time Research Mapping Division (Weiwei Ding, Andrew Herbert, Andrew Naish)
- data.australia.gov.au datasets used
The KML Cruncher is a web service/web page that converts and generalises ESRI polygon shape files into KML ready for the web. It’s useful for those people who quickly want to move from the ESRI shape file format into KML for web mash ups, without the fuss of obtaining heavy weight GIS systems. For more info, check out this blog: http://mappingexperience.blogspot.com/2009/11/space-time-research-releases-kml.html
Although this isn’t the most visually appealing app in the competition, I’ve done extensive searching on the web for a tool like this, and nothing like this exists. There are plenty of tools out there that can generate KML, but they usually cost too much and/or don’t do polygon generalisation (polygon generalisation makes KML nice and fast for the web), so I hope people find it useful for their various web projects now and in the future.
There have been days I wished for something like this. Days! This is awesome! 5 stars!
This is sooooo useful!!
Thanks heaps, Andrew. You are saving me from a lost of misery and frustration. Indeed, the converter tools that are out there do not allow for generalisation and a 6MB kml file just isn’t useful for map ‘mashup’ visualisation in a lot of instances.
Thank You Thank You Thank You.
(P.S.: Of course there is room for improvements, in that it would be nice if the simplified polygons would still be aligned, i.e. no gaps. But that’s pushing it, I know!)
Thanks for doing this, I spent hours on my mashup trying to the resolve the issue of how I could generalise polygons. As flagged above the simplicity of this probably belies the importance of this.