Displaying My Runkeeper Tours in ArcGIS online

Copy & pasted from my submission in the Coursera-Course Maps and the Geospatial Revolution, which I do recommend. At the end of the course, each student has to create a map, which is then peer-reviewed by other students for the final grade. I probably will not get very good grades with this one, because I don’t show any interesting effects on this map, but I wasn’t going to just „throw away“ the work I did on it.

I have been tracking my jogging trips and occasionally the tours I do on my bicycle with the app „Runkeeper“ for a while. It is possible to see one tour at a time on a map from the app, but not all tours at once. I always wanted to get a sense of which places I’ve already „conquered“ surrounding my home and which were still unexplored:-) So I seized the opportunity to finally export the data from Runkeeper and Import it into ArcGis online.

Technical Details

When exporting from Runkeeper, each tour is saved as one GPX-file. I am too lazy to spend one hour to upload each file individually, so I took 3 hours to write some code to automate parts of it. I wrote a program in Java which allows to select a set of GPX-input files and creates one big output file from it. To keep the number of individual points low, I added an option to only keep every Nth data point (coordinate) of one tour. For the posted example, only one point in 50 was kept.

Even with reducing the amount of points, the feature-limit of 1000 in ArcGis Online was still easily broken. Therefore, I added another limitation and only kept the cycling tours, removing all „running“ and „other“. Now I was able to import into ArcGis online.

The source code for the program is hosted on github: https://github.com/panschk/gpxmerge

I finally had some stupid manual effort when coloring the different tours. In the beginning, each one was displayed as a brown line, I had to manally assign a color to each tour. At least the result now looks quite colorful:)

http://bit.ly/16UsDQZ

Story

Quity simply, this map shows the different cycling tours completed by me in 2013 and the end of 2012. For me personally, this is quite interesting, and maybe also to some of my friends, so this would be my audience.