The FREE Rosetta Stone of GIS Data Formats

Could DNR Garmin be the Rosetta Stone of GIS Data?

It will now read from and/or save to the following file formats:

• Shapefiles
• ESRI File-based Geodatabase (9.2 only & only if you have it installed on your system. It apparently uses ArcObjects)
• KML
• GPX
• Text files (comma or semi-colon delimited)
• DBF

 

The Save As file options (I don’t have ArcGIS 9.2 installed on this computer so the Geodatabase option doesn’t show up).

In addition to saving as & reading from files, it will also read from & save directly into ArcMap or Google Earth.

A new version (5.2 beta) was released on March 12, 2007, with several new & important features. This program was already on my “Must Have” list for anyone working with GPS units. It is invaluble for the field work we do at Plateau Land & Wildlife.

Another great feature that it has but only some of us can use is the Image Hotlink/Geocode feature. This works essentially the same as GPicSync (a Google Code project). But DNR Garmin has been doing it for several years now.

This feature works based on the time stamps of your waypoints or tracks and the time stamp of your photos. It can automatically calculate an offset if your clocks aren’t syncronized.

Notice the “Project and Unproject Coordinates” menu items above. The software uses the Proj.4 projection libary to allow reprojection into a vast array of coordinate systems & datums very rapidly.

I’m fairly certian that you could use the libaries used by this program to make a utility that worked with any and all attributes included in your data rather than just the GPS centric fields that this works with by default. To be fair, though if you have some standard attributes, you can cutomize the fields for waypoints, tracks, routes, and real-time data to include whatever fields you want.
Update - Price for all of this : Free

I’m sure you can think of plenty of innovative ways to use this software but let me share an example with you.

As I’ve posted about before we do a lot of bird surveys in the spring. Many of these are done by sub-contractors who don’t have access to a GIS system. Let’s say we have a new client for whom we have never done a survey before. We send the sub-contractor a shapefile of the client property. She then uses DNR Garmin to convert that shapefile directly into KML & into her Google Earth My Places file. She opens up GE & there the property is with aerial photo, roads, & elevation. She adds placemarks for each of the proposed survey stations which she picks based on the info visible in GE. If she wants to colaborate with the biologist familar with the property they can easily share the info to each other. Then she opens DNR Garmin, loads those placemarks directly from GE to her GPS unit. Gets driving directions from her house to the client property through GE and goes and does the survey. If we wanted her to, she could send us back a shapefile of the census stations by saving the actual station locations from her GPS unit into a shapefile via DNR Garmin.

Deer Browse, Birds Sing, & I write no code

For the last 2 weeks in April, I've been doing deer & bird surveys. I always look forward to them each year. It's great to out there and get to see/hear interesting wildlife. We do a series of daylight cruise surveys of exotic & native deer for density & composition counts on a very large ranch in the western hill country. We start them at dawn and they last 3 hours. I drive from San Antonio to be there in the mornings so it makes for a VERY long day when you work till 6pm upon your return. The bird surveys are also in the mornings but they are local and don't take nearly as long.

I've been looking at the Atlas demo video Scott G. did and plan on using that in my next ASP.NET app. These past weeks I definitely fulfilled the "Write less code" item on Scott's ToDo list, I wrote NO code. Too busy just keeping things running when I get back from surveys and not enough time to do the interesting app development work. I am transitioning the reporting of these survey results to database systems instead of the old individual excel file system. I actually already transferred all the data reporting for the Bird surveys over to a MySql / PHP based web system as discussed in my last post.

The technique we use for the Deer surveys is called Distance Sampling. The data collection requires a GPS point at your 1st sight of the animal(s), Distance to animal(s), Bearing to animal(s), and then information on the animals themselves. We record the points & track in our GPS units and then download them using DNRGarmin and save them as shapefiles for processing using Hath's Analysis Tools for ArcGIS. The results are analyzed in DISTANCE. We also manually record the coordinates for each waypoint and all the other info. As you can imagine writing all the info and then having someone enter it all in, can be rather tedious.

I'm planning on writing a data collection interface for use with our Palms so we can eliminate that step. It should in theory be quite easy, but I've never written anything for Palm OS before. My idea is to output an XML file based on the data entered, sync the Palms with the desktop upon return, and then use the .NET XML to DB tools to quickly upload and combine all the separate XML file data. If anyone has tried this before or has some good suggestion or pointers on writing for Palm OS, I'd love to hear it.