[Aust-NZ] Portable geospatial file formats (was: Live CDs for the FOSS4G conference and DebianGIS)

[Robert Coup]

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 5:20 PM, Chris Tweedie <chris at narx.net> wrote:
> Completely agree on the SQLite front however the lack of a robust spatial
>  indexing scheme really puts a downer on an otherwise awesome solution.

definitely, i'll dig up the link for progress on that. OGR stores WKT
in "spatial" fields at the moment... ick.

>  If you were a delegate at FOSS4G, performance should always reign supreme
>  even if it comes at the expense of truncated DBF columns and limited
>  datatypes (eg. Shp). That said, i wouldn't be surprised if the spatial
>  indexing comes in very, very soon so i'm all for it. I have used sqlite many
>  times in the past mainly for portability ... the missing link would be out
>  the box support for it in desktop apps. Although again, critical mass seems
>  to be almost here.

Surely we (OSSG/OSGeo) should be taking a lead here? SQLite is
displacing MySQL for many 'small' webapps because it *just works*
across platforms (and most sites don't see 1000 hits a day).

There's no reason we couldn't collectively get Spatialite into
GDAL/OGR, GRASS, uDig, QGIS, and the others... maybe as an addon for
ESRI as well. Shapefiles are definitely past their prime in several
ways.

Rob :)