THE FEASIBILITY OF EXPORTING GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM DATA TO GOOGLE EARTH

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 usersThe 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.