Okayee..

This *should* be very, very simple, but I’ve never used GIS before.

I have a series of about 50 latitude and longitude co-ordinates that I need to project onto a simple 2D world map outline with country boundaries. It would be ideal if the points for each of these co-ordinates were labelled with some descriptive text also, eg. (Smith et al. 2010)

I’ve tried to do this in free downloads of:

ARC GIS
GRASS
Diva

But literally can not make head nor tail of how to achieve this simple thing!

ARC GIS only seems to allow me to place big ‘pins’ everywhere on the world
GRASS just gives me a blank white space to play with
In Diva I’ve managed to import a world map outline ‘layer’, but am unable to actually do anything at all with it.

Any help gratefully received.

Thanks! 🙂

These guys can probably help:

http://gis.stackexchange.com/

If I was looking for a free GIS program I’d go with

QGIS

Put your coordinates into an excel spreadsheet, with x, y, and source columns. Put each x and y coord in and your source. I’m assuming your coords are WGS84 lat long decimal degrees eg “53.21232, 1.32435” , if they are in other formats you might need to do some more processing.

in Arc add the excel worksheet using add data or Arccatalog, then right click and display x/y, best to export this to a shapefile after too. Then depending on the version you are using go to File add basemap and choose or search for a suitable basemap if you don’t have any on your system.

Depending on where you are in the world you could be better off using a projected coordinate system rather than WGS84 as it’ll look ‘stretched’. Depends on the spread of your data though.

Simple using this http://batchgeo.com/

goeffi… OMG!

That is freakin’ well awesome!! Might not need to go the GIS route after all! Cheers!

(Thanks for all the other GIS advice, also. If batchgeo fails me, that’s where I’ll be returning to next anyways..)