Ingestion…… is there a better term for this process?
Just working on some file ingestion specifically for converting PPT files into flash. The web output from PowerPoint is woahfully lacking. So….. I’m going to use hpricot and standard folder traversing to ingest all the content in our power point presentations. I’ll setup watch folders that we can drop files into for automated ingestion. Here are some initial links:
- file traversal: http://cf-bill.blogspot.com/2007/02/ruby-directory-traversal.html
- hpricot: http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/
Got my kml file working
Here’s a plot of NY’s counties. 
Loading data from ascii shape files
So rather than spending money on arc view, I will be using ASCII files that are space and line delimited.
GIS data and Google Maps
Trying to convert an old .e00 gis file collected from the us census bureau to arcView. Then from ArcView into a shape format that Google maps can plot. There is a ton of discovery involved specifically with the types of map projections the census bureau uses. There might need to be some normalization, but until I plot my data, I won’t know (their data is extremely undocumented). Anywho…. I’ll be updating my progress.
Links:
-Raw Data: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/co2000.html
Update: Gave up on the arcView format because of it’s proprietary nature. Looks like arcview is pretty expensive, so I’m using the ascii formated data set which seems to be a space and line delimited list of coordinates (found here: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/co2000.html). Here’s the general format:
2 -0.737111200944987E+02 0.447554053271605E+02
-0.740250260000000E+02 0.449800360000000E+02
-0.740274011055598E+02 0.449957651692313E+02
-0.740274011055598E+02 0.449957651692313E+02
END
Looks like the first line is the center point of the shape, where each proceeding line until the “END” represents each point in the polygon.