Applied Geoinformatics for Society and Environment (AGSE), Applied Geoinformatics for Society and Environment 2010

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DATA VISUALIZATION USING GOOGLE MAP: THE HARD WAY AND THE EASY WAY

Shailesh Shrestha, Franz-Josef Behr

Last modified: 2010-08-23

Abstract


GIS and other commercial mapping tools are expensive and out of reach of many NGOs which operate on low budget. However, emergence of freely available spatial tools over past few years has propagated the use of spatial information to a broad range of users. One of these tools, Google Map API has revolutionized online mapping service to display and integration of spatial data in a lot of different ways. But it is still a daunting task to display spatial data in Google Map for people who do not have knowledge about programming languages.

This paper aims to introduce Google's Fusion Table as an easy tool to visualize data quickly and easily without almost any prior programming knowledge required.

At the beginning, brief description of displaying point data with the use of Google Maps API based on Flash will be given which is followed by much simple and straight forward method using Google Fusion Table visualization approach.

There are some limitations associated with Fusion Table but this is not a hindrance for people who are happy to visualize the data with few clicks in a graphical way with no database setup costs. Therefore Google Fusion Table can be especially advantageous for people with no programming experience and for organizations operating on low budget.


Full Text: Paper (PDF)