Buffalo, NY conducted 9 community workshops in March for the Buffalo Green Code, a website I maintain. Recently, I had put the workshop summaries (one for each section of town) online. They recorded comments during the sessions and created geographic layers corresponding to the strong and weak areas of each neighborhood. We wanted to post these maps online with the capability of zooming in and panning. Google maps seemed like the logical answer but how would be get our layer in Google Maps?
In ESRI GIS, you can export your data as a KML file. There is a free extension you can download to provide you with this capability. Then, I uploaded the KML file to the web server. Then I went to the Google Maps page, maps.google.com where in the address bar, I put the path to one of my kml files which looks something like this: http://www.buffalogreencode.com/kml/strong_weak.kml. Google Maps will load this KML file as a layer once I hit the search button with the above file path in the address search bar.
I then customized the size of it by selecting the share link and customizing the size and original zoom. Google Maps will provide you with iframe code that you can copy paste into your web page to embed the map on your site. Check out all 45 KML Google Maps I created to summarize the citizen of Buffalo’s concerns and the future possibilities.
