[gdal-dev] Overcome attribute name limitation in shapefiles

[Even Rouault]

On mardi 7 mars 2017 09:17:50 CET Felix Obermaier wrote:
> Peter,
> 
> why would it cease to respect the dBaseIV Standard? I’m not proposing a
> change regarding the dBase format but an additional file that gives
> additional information the data in the attribute column. If you don’t
> supply that file you don’t have the additinal information, but you still
> can access the data and have to figure out by yourself what it is.
 
> I know that there are other data sources that are not limited in the size
> for column names that I can use. But often I’m asked „Can you provide me a
> Shapefile“ and then I’m sometimes stuck with column names that are
> abbreviated to undistinctness.
 Or I get a shapefile of that kind, which
> does not make it any better. 
> Felix
> 
> Von: Peter Halls [mailto:p.halls at york.ac.uk]
> Gesendet: Montag, 6. März 2017 14:56
> An: Felix Obermaier <obe at IVV-AACHEN.DE>; gdal dev
> <gdal-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
 Betreff: Re: [gdal-dev] Overcome attribute name
> limitation in shapefiles 
> Felix,
>       following your proposal would make Shapefiles cease to respect the
> dBaseIV Standard and potentially seriously affect their interchangability. 
> There are a range of alternative formats supported by GDAL that achieve
> your goal: for example, I use SQL as my base format and only convert when
> necessary.  SQL is generally accepted by other packages and is far more
> flexible than dBaseIV.
 Best wishes,
> Peter
> 
> On 6 March 2017 at 13:26, Felix Obermaier
> <obe at ivv-aachen.de<mailto:obe at ivv-aachen.de>> wrote:
 Hello,
> 
> is it somehow possible to overcome the attribute name length limitiation of
> DBase files using GDAL? If so, how?
 
> If not, why not add (another) file the shapefile dataset of shapes (shp,
> shx), projection (prj), data (dbf) and encoding(cpg), one that is (re-)
> defining the column names, allowing for
 
>   *   mixed casing,
>   *   non-ASCII characters,
>   *   more than 10/11 characters
> 
> I’m aware of a software product that does it this way. The file that renames
> the columns is set up like a CSV file defining two columns, „Name“ and
> „Alias“. „Name“ is the actual name of the column, „Alias“ the name in the
> dbase file header.

What is this software that produces this sidecar CSV-like format ? Could you show examples 
of such datasets ?

 
> Felix Obermaier
> 
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> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------------------------------------
 Peter J Halls, Post-war Reconstruction
> and Development Unit (PRDU), University of York
> 
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>         University of York,
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