Free For All – PhyloGeoViz

With the third, and yes, final edition of my G-FAQ series focused on Google Earth, this month’s Free for All is of course another GE add-on. For those of you who need a way to visualize geographic data that can be represented by a pie chart, PhyloGeoViz is an online mapping solution that will convert tabular data to a KML file. While PhyloGeoViz is by no means perfect, it is definitely a cool solution to create a set of portable pie charts that anyone can view if they have Google Earth installed.

Here are some tips I can offer to get you started with PhyloGeoViz:

A screengrab of the Boulder-area census data KML that I created with PhyloGeoViz.

• Firefox seemed to work the best for data entry and export to KML.
• When you input your data, be sure to follow the formatting guidelines. I inputted my geospatial data into an Excel spreadsheet and then copied it over to Firefox.
• There are multiple customizations you can do to make your pie chart KML easier to work with, one of the most important was changing the chart size which was found in multiple menus.
• Labeling the various ‘hap’ columns proved problematic so I do not suggest altering these values under, ‘Pie Options.’

I created a KML you can download here to display race percentage by city in the Boulder, Colorado area. You can also download the spreadsheet I made to input this data to PhyloGeoViz here.

Until my next edition of Free For All, happy hunting for free geospatial goodies!

Brock Adam McCarty
Map Wizard
(720) 470-7988

brock@apollomapping.com