Is there any alternate free application like Google Earth Pro ? , My main thing is it should import shape files as a layer in the map.
Depends upon what you are looking for. If you really just want to see the shapefile, use something like qgis or udig.
If you want to see the shapefile on top of a street map or a satellite base layer, I am not sure there is something that will work for you out of the box. Open Street Map has the data; a service like http://www.osm974.re/osm2gis/ can export a limited area of Open Street Map data as a shapefile.
You might want to peruse this page from the Open Street Map wiki: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Shapefiles
There's this open source application called "Marble" that works ok...but unfortunately you can't load shapefiles into it. You have to convert your shapefiles into wkt with qgis or something before loading them in. The satellite imagery is so pathetic as to be considered nonexistent. But its faster than Google Earth Pro that's for sure, and you can use OpenStreetMap to get a pretty good vector scaled experience to see where you are.
http://marble.kde.org/index.php
Related
The below linked map contains a number of layers which I would like to be able to extract as polygons [if possible]. I've not previously done any web-scraping and realise that doing so in regards to the geographic data on this system represents a significant challenge.
Ideally I would only want to extract the data relating to the 'Shopping Local Centre' category.
Happy to try to use Phython or R to achieve such, just wondered if anyone had any ideas.....
Web scraping (using BeautifulSoup, for example) would get you the HTML objects from a webpage. You would need basic knowledge of Python for this.
Or you could avoid that by going this route:
With QGIS and Geofabrik you can gather retail location polygons and their attributes of a given area.
Use Geofabrik to download your area of interest in *.shp (shapefile) format. It looks like you're in Greater Manchester, so I navigated to the download page here (it's a 50MB file for the greater-manchester-latest-free.shp.zip).
Once you download that, open it in QGIS and you'll see in the attributes it has retail locations.
That site is using WMS to display the map (I work for the company that makes iShare) so there is no vector content for you to scrape as it works entirely with images.
The easiest way to get the data would be to ask the council to provide it, you might need to make it a freedom of information request but they should be happy to provide the data in a usable GIS format.
I'm trying to visualize GPS points on PowerBI maps offline and wonder what would be the best way to achieve that.
Ideally, I'd like to see the offline mapping to have the same effect as directly using the "Map" visualization - GPS points (in data as longitude and latitude columns) plotted on the Bing map. However, our team will need this function offline, because our users are usually under bad internet connections. Also we are wary about Bing's data sharing policy as our GPS information is highly confidential.
So far I've tried PowerBI's shape map function, which allows me to upload a TopoJSON file and use it offline. However, it looks like shape map is better used for highlighting a region on the map, instead of plotting individual GPS points - shape map doesn't seem to allow longitude/latitude. Besides that, shape map does not have as much information like Bing map, such as showing city/road names and etc.
Is there a way to visualize GPS points offline on PowerBI, but still get enough information about what are around the GPS points? I'm referring to PowerBI here but all things I've been doing are on PowerBI Desktop. I don't plan to publish on the web as this will be my company's internal tool. Thanks in advance!
The built-in mapping functions such as the Map visual powered by the Bing maps API and the Eris mapping do not have an offline mode. Both require an online connection. Depending on the level of detail that you require, I would suggest looking into an R or Python visual with one of the mapping libraries. Here are some examples of the R mapping libraries. But getting the map json files into Power BI will also be an issue and may not meet your requirements on the level of detail that you need.
Also we are wary about Bing's data sharing policy as our GPS information is highly confidential.
I wouldn't worry about it, Bing & Power BI mapping is used by a wide number of organisation including heath and military customers. Your confidential data is more at risk with some one copying your Power BI report and sticking it on a USB drive.
However, our team will need this function offline, because our users are usually under bad internet connections
I would try some other options for offline mapping, for example Google Maps has the ability to down load a section of the map for offline/bad connections. I've downloaded the whole UK and its about 100meg.
Hope that helps
If I search a query in google maps for example "carlton victoria australia" then it will give me a map of the region with the border around that area.
My questions are:
Is there a way to get list of all regions from the google map api for
certain province or country?
Can I combine the region information for example, change the color and also add some infowindow on top of the region?
What kind of level of the region that I can get from the api (district, subdistrict, village)?
Currently Google Maps JavaScript API doesn't expose any boundaries of geographic features. There is very old feature request in the public issue tracker to add this functionality, however it looks like Google didn't set high priority on this:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35816953
Feel free to star the public feature request to express your interest and subscribe to further updates from Google.
You can get polygons from other sources and add them to Google maps as additional layers.
The nice workaround to get polygons in GeoJSON format from OpenStreetMap is described in the following answer:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/40172098/5140781
So, if you download the GeoJSON you will be able to add it to map using the data layer and its loadGeoJson() method:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/datalayer#load_geojson
You can style colors of GeoJSON objects and create info windows. Just read the aforementioned documentation.
I hope this helps!
I am showing world map on dashboard where few locations needs to shown as highlighted. I need to highlight few locations on map based on airport code. For example, IAD is airport code for Dallas, So if a data-center having IAD in its name then Dallas will be highlighted on Map.
Till yet, I tried leaflet.js an open source geo map library. but it requires coordinates to pin a location. I want something like google map (can't use google API as paid tool) where you may pin a location by its name.
If somebody could suggest a library or a heads-up towards how to achieve it, It would be appreciated.
If you are using Leaflet, you will need lat-lng coordinates no matter what.
If you only have placenames, then you'll have to run a geocoding query to convert the addesss/placename into lat-lng coordinates. You might want to start your search in the list of geocoding plugins for Leaflet.
I want to get all tourist attractions around a zip code in the US. How do I do that from OpenStreetMap api?
I have found this http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:tourism
But I'm not sure how to use it.
http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=135+pilkington+avenue,+birmingham&format=json&polygon=1&addressdetails=1&tourism=attraction
You can use overpass turbo e.g. with the query wizard to show for the current bounding box the available objects.
To do this for a zip code instead of a bounding box this is much more complicated even in a properly mapped region like Germany, because to my knowledge there are no relations (or very rarely) that map a zip code to a boundary polygon. You could obtain several addresses with zip codes and then create a kind of a boundary for it but that won't be very precise. Regarding US you also have probably less features like zip code mapped due to the Tiger import (less mapping activity), not sure.