Placemark have released a neat map-data conversation tool that transforms data between pretty much any geo-data file format. Upload files or paste text, convert and then download the converted data in no time.
From the announcement post:
In the course of implementing lots and lots of file formats in Placemark, we’ve ended up with some great, reusable tools. I figured it’d be pretty useful to just let anyone use those things, on a convenient drag & drop (or click, or paste) page. I hope it’s useful. Happy Friday!
This list will go out of date, but right now - you can convert:
- GeoJSON, GeoJSONL
- FlatGeobuf
- CSV
- Excel
- Zipped ESRI Shapefiles
- GPX
- TCX
- Encoded polylines
- Extract data from GeoTIFFs & JPEGs
- KML & KMZ
This is a tool you want to bookmark.
Tom MacWright explores whether newer geo-data formats, like FlatGeobuf, Zarr, GeoParquet, Arrow, or COGs, are useful for applications making frequent updates to the data.
The post dives deep into some of the characteristics of these data formats, including compression, random access, and random writes, and concludes that they are optimised for reading data and that the benefits for writes are limited:
I like these new formats and I’ll support them, but do they benefit a usecase like Placemark ? If you’re on the web, and have data that you expect to update pretty often, are there wins to be had with new geospatial formats? I’m not sure.
Flatgeobuf is a relatively new binary format to encode geographic vector data. Unlike vector tiles, Flatgeobuf is a lossless encoding format, which is streamable and enables random feature access.
Horace Williams wrote a comprehensive overview of what goes into a Flatgeobuf file and how it is structured internally.