GIS on Weekend: Thematic Mapping
Today, people interest to GIS becomes greater since it can be applied to various sectors. It is also shown by the enthusiasm of participants in “GIS on Weekend” training held by the SIMKES, they come from various backgrounds, e.g. lecturers, graduate students, and staff of health office. In the third meeting on last Saturday (August 16, 2008), the topic was “thematic Mapping”, that was, participants were taught the way to make a thematic map. A thematic map displays spatial pattern of a theme or series of attributes and emphasizes spatial variation of one or a small number of geographic distributions. A thematic map can be made by converting Shapefiles (SHP) into a kml files which can be applied to Google Earth.
SHP is a vector format (format proprietary open specification) as the product of ESRI, a GIS software company (ArcInfo, ArcView, ArcIMS, dan ArcGIS). This format has 3 extension file, they are:
- Main file: *.shp
- Index file: *.shx
- DBase file: *.dbf
Data conversion from SHP files into kml files can be done in several ways. There are software which provide this conversion application, such as Arc GIS 9.2, Arc view GIS 3x (extension), DNR Garmin 5.3, Mapwindow 45CF with plug-ins Shape2earth 1.45.01, Shp2kml, etc. Among those softwares, Shp2kml is the easiest one and can be run indepedently without the main program. This application can be downloaded in http://www.zonums.com:80/files/Shp2kml.zip. After downloading the application, unzip the shp2kml.zip become shp2kml.exe.
Happy trying J
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