The other day at work, I was asked to find out how many X* were in a particular district in England. Given we seem to have SO MANY ways that we slice & dice the country up with Ceremonial Counties, Parliamentary Constituencies, Local Government Districts (which can be boroughs, cities or Royal Boroughs) you can see why I started to have a small panic! But then I remembered you could search for districts in Google and it would outline them with a little red boundary line, so I gave it go.
Great…except I then wanted to overlay the data I already had mapped in a Google Fusion table with longitudes & latitudes. FAIL. I could find no way of either exporting this boundary data, or overlaying the longitude & latitude points I had setup in a fusion table. So I Googled around the subject and found this wonderful post on Stack Overflow – so I needed to head on over the OpenStreetMap, download the boundary data for my district, additionally convert the gpx file to a KML and then whack it in to Google Earth…so I did that!
1) Find the district you want in OpenStreetMap
2) Download the gpx file and then convert it to a KML on Gpx2KML.com
3) Load your resulting KML in to Google Earth and hey presto…
I then exported my data with the longitude & latitude points in it from my Google Fusion table as a KML file and then imported it in to Google Earth and all the little points appear on a layer over my district boundary.
Hooray! Fortunately, there were only four points within the boundary – I need to think about what would happen if we were talking hundreds or thousands – how would I manage that? Is there a way to filter in Google Earth to say give me all the X in boundary Y? I’m not sure but I’ll be darn sure to find out!
* Trying to maintain a bit of anonymity here!