Gt Aide: A User Friendly Freeware for Gridding, Sampling and Smart Phone Applications

Gt Aide is software developed in Visual Basic. The software is designed to create user defined grids, lines and sample points for any number of user polygons just by a click. The output text data is viewed in notepad whereas the maps are opened in Google earth as kml (Keyhole Marked up Language) files using shell command. Gt Aide is designed such a way that polygon data from any part of the globe can be imported into the software. Polylines and points are also being plotted and viewed in Google earth using Gt Aide. Further, the kml files generated by the software can be imported in any smart phone and viewed in Google earth. The GPS facility in the smart phone provides the live location and hence, the user is able to plan survey, sampling and investigation at great ease. A layer consists of all UTM Zones is added to superpose over Google earth view that facilitates to get the UTM zones at once. The geographic coordinates of polygons are imported in Gt Aide for creating grids of various types and lines and sample points at user defined intervals that are automatically opened in Google earth as kml file. The gridding of polygons includes: grids with centroids within polygon, grid boundaries within polygon, grids along the polygon boundary, grids outside the polygon but within the boundary extent and also combination of these. The creation of lines within polygons at user defined intervals has the facilities like: north-south, east-west and inclined lines for any straight or irregular polygons. The lines thus generated can be clipped within polygons by selecting the clip option. The coordinates of grid centroids and lines are saved as text files and viewed in Notepad. The sampling of lines at any given combination and interval within a polygon is possible just by a click. Grids can also be generated within two extreme coordinates and around a point as well. Gt Aide also facilitates to calculate area and perimeter of any number of polygons in various units. The Gt Aide also provides a lat-long converter that converts the geographic coordinates from one format to another. The ‘Open as Vectors’ menu helps a user to create vectors and open in Google earth on the run. The input data for creating vectors are point coordinates, vector direction and length. It is also noted here that there is no direct method to open vectors in Google earth. The gridding, line clipping, sampling etc mentioned above can only be achieved using GIS software by following different steps or making use of downloaded plug-in modules. Unlike GIS software, Gt Aide enables a user to extract information without undergoing any formal training. The main advantage of ‘Gt Aide’ is that one can easily ‘click and take’ the data and view the output in Google earth without the support of any GIS software. Further, the kml files generated by Gt Aide are being opened in smart phones and one can carry out the survey, exploration, sampling etc at great ease without the aid of any base.