[Qgis-user] GPX data in QGIS.

[Greg Troxel]

Charles Dixon-Paver <charles at kartoza.com> writes:

> Routes are an ordered combination of points, which indicate the position
> and direction, whilst tracks are a log of the receiver position over time.

True.

> In practice, if you were just tracking a hike through the forest, it's
> probably not of great importance, however if you were doing field capture
> of high fidelity data (e.g. a road network, with specific start and end
> positions in a street, with the direction indicating traffic flow etc), you
> would probably find the distinction has significantly more value. A

That's not really how it ends up in practice usually.  A route is
basically a plan for a navigation session, sort of "start here, then go
here, then go there".  Routes are typically created as a planning
operation, and then loaded onto a receiver (or you can create them on
the device, but you are using it as a computer when you do).  Tracks are
typically a record of observations, and thus represent a history of
where the device was.

One can transfer a track to a device, and can typically also say "route
along this track".

One thing to note about GPX is that there is a standard and then there
are extensions.
  https://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/1/gpx.xsd
So it may be that the navigation program the OP is using stores
information about distance and time.  GPX proper is just a list of
waypoints.  From that one can of course compute distance, but not time.

I am not sure if Jimi created "tracks" or "routes".  I would suggest
reading the GPX file with a text editor to understand what files are in
there.  If it is unreadable due to poor formatting choices (a belief
that whitespace doesn't matter in gpx becuase it is for computers not
humans :-( ), gpsbabel as a filter to read and write gpx may help.
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