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Open a GeoPackage, and turn it into Darwin Core or KML

GeoPackage (OGC 12-128) → Darwin Core Archive · KML

What you are seeing — you were told to switch from shapefiles to GeoPackage, and now nothing you have opens a .gpkg either.

The short answer

A GeoPackage is a SQLite database with a few extra tables that declare what is in it: which tables are map layers, which column of each holds the geometry, and what coordinate system it is in. All of that lives INSIDE the one file, which is the point.

What it buys you over a shapefile is real. Column names are not capped at 10 characters — a shapefile's .dbf truncates them and the original spelling is gone. The coordinate system travels in the file instead of in a .prj sidecar somebody can lose. Text is Unicode by the format's own definition, so there is no character set to guess at.

The rest of the answer — 2 more points

One caveat worth knowing: a GeoPackage exported from a shapefile inherits the shapefile's truncation. The format has no cap, but the names were already cut before the GeoPackage was written, and no reader can undo that. We say when we see names sitting at exactly ten characters, because it usually means exactly this.

We read GeoPackage natively — no conversion step, no GIS. Drop one and you get the same report a shapefile gets: the columns, what their values support, and what we refused to interpret.

Getting it out again

  1. Drop the .gpkg. If it holds several layers we list them and ask which one you meant, rather than picking the first.
  2. For a biodiversity portal: the converter builds a Darwin Core Archive from the layer's table. A Parameter / Value / Units block becomes a MeasurementOrFact extension — a second table keyed on the record id — because GBIF's occurrence core has no field for measurements and putting them there would drop them.
  3. For Google Earth: take the KML from the viewer. It is refused if the layer is in a projected system, because KML means WGS 84 and we will not reproject silently.
  4. For a spreadsheet: the table comes out with the geometry as a WKT column, which keeps the coordinates in the file's own system and names that system beside them.
Drop the .gpkg

We read GeoPackage directly — layers, full-length columns, and the coordinate system out of the file's own SRS table. Free during the testing period · no account needed · without one, what we read is kept to teach the reader, names removed; sign in and nothing is kept.

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