Link – Virtual Earth Shapefile Viewer – via Virtual Earth Blog
Interesting and it works pretty well. Upload any shapefile to the Internet and then just paste the URL into the form and submit. There isn’t any description yet on how this is done or what you need to do to your shapefiles to get them ready to inclusion into Virtual Earth, but it is impressive non the less. Hover over the centroid to get a pop-up id of each record. The GIS community has pretty much ignored Virtual Earth since day one, but maybe this is the start of something new.
Update – Brian Flood post the following in the comments.
pretty slick. for the record:
- background transfer of XML encoded point,polyline,polygon shapefile data. I’m not sure if its GML or just some quick and dirty xml
- javascript (js) parses the xml and either uses a custom class MPolyline to create VML (IE only) for polylines/polygons. For points, it just uses the VE AddPin method. Translation between the XML coords to map coords is handled with VE GetX()/GetY() methods
- local javascript from the site adds prototype handlers to the main VE_MapControl that handle the VML placed on top of it
- Looks like some symbology is randomly generated.
nice work, whoever they are 😉