Using Virtual Earth with UK Eastings and Northings
Hi All,
I work for a Council in the UK and we are looking to use Popfly with our new MOSS 2007 platform.
I have got my head round the basics and made a couple of blocks that grab data from an XML containing some LOB info.
My problem is that in our orginisaion all our data is geocoded to the British UTM (Easting/Northing) system not the Lat/Long that the VE block accepts. I have tried pushing Address data through geonames but it is to inaccurate for the UK.
http://www.popfly.ms/users/Orm/RMBCSchools2
Anyone got any suggestions?
Thanks
[702 byte] By [
Orm] at [2008-2-22]
Unfotunatley the geonames block doesn't convert long/lat and UTM or vice versa.
I'm not aware of any web services that do the conversion either, of course they're might be some and to be honest I'm not at all sure what the conversion looks like.But it might be possible do write as block that does it.
Orm,
I work for civil engineering consultancy Halcrow and just this moment jumping over a similar problem. Most of the data for British projects isn't MS Virtual Earth or Google Earth compatible co-ordinate system either.
MapInfo will be your easiest solution. Whack "MapInfo to Google Earth" into a search engine and a MapInfo extension should come up. Using this extension, you can convert the entire contents of a display window in MapInfo (for arguements sake just the shapefile you require) into Google Earth compatible co-ords. Whats useful is that GE uses the same co-ord system as MS Virtual Earth, so you can basically just take these co-ords and stick them into VE. For what I'm trying to do at the moment theres about a couple hundred thousand vertices in the shapefile I'm trying to "import" into a VE platform, so it's a bit long winded to then go and take the GE format output and cut and paste things so that VE will accept it, but it's no more than an hours work or so once you know what to change - mainly just headers, and change the format of stuff.
Pointer - that extension annoyingly exports the co-ords for Lat/Long the wrong way round. Thats the only difference between GE and VE, to my knowledge. So you have to take the exported GE file, cut the headers and basic rubbish out of there, save as a delimited txt file, import into MapInfo accordingly and then swop the two columns round, then reexport.
You can use this method to make (to my knowledge - don't hold me to this) anything of MapInfo compatible co-ordinate format something that GE or VE will accept.
Hope that helps.
Tom
