Shapefile Overlay in Virtual Earth

15/04/2008
The Official Virtual Earth Blog picked up the this post and there 'maybe' potential for Virtual Earth to support ESRI Shapefiles in future edtions of Virtual Earth...(v6.2 please).
Read the post.
http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!14450.entry
(add a comment to include this support)

Shapefile Overlay in Virtual Earth

A nice little application to display ESRI Shapefiles in Virtual Earth (Live Maps)

Highlight - Load from your local drive - takes a few moments.
**Your data needs to be in WGS84 for this to work correctly.


London Low Emissions Zones (LEZ) Shapefile was projected from British National Grid to WGS84.


When you zoom in the detail is maintained, zoom out an a automatic poylgon generalisation is preformed on your data in the display.


Your data can be rasterised 'on thefly' so it can be shown in 3D in Virtual Earth (Plugin required)

Suggestion - A Legend, possible to select your own colours.
A simple "6.1" on the end of the javascript code will update it to VE 6.1 (more functions)
"http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.1"

A progess bar when uploading from shapefile - FireFox can bail out with an error.

Select .shp only on upload - .dbf and .shx need to exist for a shapefile. Select.zip?

Load .avl or .lyr for thematic maps?

But other than that - if you want to view data in VE quickly then is a good method.

Well done to JuanDoNeblo & Marco Anastasi

source code see the code and details on how this was achieved.
http://geekswithblogs.net/JuanDoNeblo/Default.aspx

Mapperz