THE FEASIBILITY OF EXPORTING GEOGRAPHICALINFORMATION SYSTEM DATA TO GOOGLE EARTH

Abstract

Image satellite is one of the important sources for the Geographical Information
System (GIS). With world-level coverage of satellite, aerial photography, streets
points of interest and more, made the Google Earth (GE) as one of the geobrowsers
programs that enable data with a spatial component to be used by both GIS and non-
GIS users
The objective of the present study is to explore the feasibility to export and integrate
existing GIS format data including shapefiles into a GE format for display as a layer
at the same location of the study area, and manipulation by using various ArcGIS9.2
tools. Export_to_KML software was used for converting the data from GIS format
to GE format. This process is potentially very useful in the direct interaction of the
GIS datasets over the internet by desktop mapping tools such as GE , where their
integration with GIS information is especially helpful in the viewing the
information in a spatial context. All the created shapefiles of this study have been
done by author using ESRI's ArcGIS9.2 Desktop and defined according to
WGS84_UTM_Zone 38N projected system.
The results revealed that both GIS vector and attribute data can be effectively
exported and visualized using GE. Moreover, most of the GE functions can be
applied on the exported GIS layers that can be visualized on the GE window.