Part II of a two part post on the GIS Education Community blog appeared the other day, picking up where the previous post left off with a discussion of how to take GPS readings and turn them into shapefiles, and then add hyperlinks.

But there's another way to accomplish the same thing, and also new capabilities coming in ArcGIS Explorer 480 which will make things even easier.

One option might be to save the GPS coordinates as a comma or tab-delimited text file, and import the file to create results. We covered this topic in a post back in July, 2007, and while we were working with a much older version of Explorer at the time, the information in the post is still correct. A nice thing about results is that it's very easy to do interesting things with their popups, which we covered in another post not long ago. So these methods could have been used instead of the shapefile creation method described in the Education Community post.

But soon there will be an even easier way. New in Explorer 480 is support for GPX format files. Wikipedia describes GPX as follows:

GPX, or GPS eXchange Format is an XML schema designed for transferring GPS data between software applications. It can be used to describe waypoints, tracks, and routes.

We visited the GPXchange site to download a file of interest, one with locations of hot springs in California. In the soon-to-be-released Explorer 480 we imported the GPX file and created a collection of waypoints from the downloaded file. We'll save the step-by-step details for a later post, after we've released Explorer 480, but we ended up with a result group, with each result representing a waypoint in the file. Here we've clicked a couple of them to open the popup window to display more information about the waypoint.