[Qgis-user] GPX data in QGIS.

[J. M]

Hi there Greg and Charles,

Many thanks for your help as well; I guessed it was something like this,
but there are many distinctions in GIS which are lost on a total novice
like me!

Kind regards,
Jimi.

On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 10:03 PM Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote:

>
> 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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