I know that I’ll be looking into that in the near future, so keep your eye out for an updated demo in the next year, assuming I’m successful! Viewing the Files in ArcMap Unfortunately, ArcMap is not open source, but you should be able to apply the below concepts to opensource software like QGIS or GRASS instead.

I used ArcMap, one of the tools in ESRI ArcGIS Desktop. Specifically, for this demo, I walk through how to take vector data from a geodatabase (.gdb) file and turn it into GeoJSON. Despite my trepidation, after only a few hours I was happily exporting all sorts of data from existing projects to use in open source alternatives to ESRI. Thanks to excellent notes left by Rob Shepard and Nicholas Gliserman, our previous CDRH GIS experts, I had a pretty good starting foundation for the next steps. The next problem was that most of the files can’t be picked up straight out of the ESRI server and put into something else. So okay, no big deal, right? Just take the old map files and put them in some new technology? The problem was, we no longer have a GIS specialist in the CDRH. With this in mind, it was time to recreate maps with a new technology.

Furthermore, many of the maps were only viewable in Flash, a technology whose days are numbered. We have many projects that rely heavily on maps, from Cuban Battlefields to Civil War Washington, all previously living their lives on an 8 year old server whose ESRI license ($$$) is set to expire at the end of the summer. We have had a looming problem on our hands for a while at the center: what we should do about our aging map projects living on a dying server.

Convert arcgis layer to shapefile