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Shape to Fusion Hi. This website lets you import a shapefile to Google Fusion Tables. This blog post has some details on how it was built. To continue, you will need to authorize this site to access your Fusion Tables data on your behalf. Site by Josh Livni. Source code available at http://code.google.com/p/shpescape/

DIVA-GIS DIVA-GIS is a free computer program for mapping and geographic data analysis (a geographic information system (GIS). With DIVA-GIS you can make maps of the world, or of a very small area, using, for example, state boundaries, rivers, a satellite image, and the locations of sites where an animal species was observed. We also provide free spatial data for the whole world that you can use in DIVA-GIS or other programs. You can use the discussion forum to ask questions, report problems, or make suggestions. Or contact us, and read the blog entries for the latest news. But first download the program and read the documentation. DIVA-GIS is particularly useful for mapping and analyzing biodiversity data, such as the distribution of species, or other 'point-distributions'. It reads and write standard data formats such as ESRI shapefiles, so interoperability is not a problem. DIVA-GIS runs on Windows and (with minor effort) on Mac OSX (see instructions). You can use the program to analyze data, for example by making grid (raster) maps of the distribution of biological diversity, to find areas that have high, low, or complementary levels of diversity. And you can also map and query climate data. You can predict species distributions using the BIOCLIM or DOMAIN models.

« Illustrator MultiExporter script: Now with JPG and EPS When Maps Shouldn’t Be Maps View full interactive map on nytimes.com » Often, when you get data that is organized by geography — say, for example, food stamp rates in every county, high school graduation rates in every state, election results in every House district, racial and ethnic distributions in each census tract — the impulse is since the data CAN be mapped, the best way to present the data MUST be a map. You plug the data into ArcView, join it up with a shapefile, export to Illustrator, clean up the styles and voilà! Instant graphic ready to be published. And in many cases, that’s the right call.