The beauty of Geocommons is the ease of use and ability to manipulate data quickly. Sometimes we have shapefiles of data that contain polygons, say for buildings. What if I want to view those buildings in Maker! by points rather than polygons. Easy! Simply upload your shapefile, fill out the metadata, and then download the data as a csv. You can find this option to the right of the layer information, which is the bottom of three options.
When you open the csv, Finder! has already found the centroids of the polygons for you and you will see two columns for latitude and longitude. The next step is to save the csv and upload this to Finder!. Now you’ve got a file of points rather than polygons. You don’t even have to change the attribute names because Finder! likes them in any format.
Another great option for the csv download is to sort based on one of the attributes. For example, if you want to see buildings by type, such as “collapsed” simply sort, select the collapsed buildings, copy and paste into a new csv. Then copy the header row and save. Reupload into Finder! and bam, you’ve got collapsed buildings as points in Maker!
Upload your own shapefiles and see what you can come up with using our easy download options.
Below are step by step screenshots of this simple process. Enjoy!
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