shape2ge

What is it?

shape2ge is a set of two applications to convert ESRI ShapeFiles into Google Earth KML files. shape2ge consists of a frontend and an engine.

• shape2ge-engine.py is a batchable converter engine that does the actual conversion. It reads conversion options from a XML config file generated by shape2ge-frontend.py or other methods.

• shape2ge-frontend.py is a CLI-based frontend that helps you generate the conversion options used by the engine. This allows you set scales and offsets (from shapefile coords to earth coords), and also to assign different display styles to different feature types.

Why another one?

There are a few similar programs on the web. The nicest one is called "Shape2Earth" and has a very nice GUI with stacks of options. Other projects like shp2kml are also available

The problem with the above is that they don't script or batch well. With shape2ge it is possible to generate one config file for a whole class of shapefiles and then to convert all the shapefiles in a script using the same config file.

For example, I have ~3000 shapefiles containing 20m contour data for South Africa. With shape2ge I can generate one config file for the whole set and then batch convert the whole lot (with some help from bash).

Screenshots

These screenshots show the result of a shapefile to kml conversion by shape2ge, they do not show shape2ge itself. The application in the screenshots is Google Earth.

An image showing contours over Johannesburg, South Africa An image showing areas with high urban density over Johannesburg, South Africa An image showing contours around Montague, South Africa