MI SDTS format - Dragon Slayers Wanted (fwd)

[Malcolm Williamson]

Hi, Michel
Thanks for your ongoing contributions. In my opinion, m.out.e00 would be
useful to a sizeable subset of GRASS users (including myself and my
cohorts here at CAST), but what we really all need are good shapefile
import/export capabilities, as, at least here in the US, shapefiles have
become almost a defacto standard for vector data (yuk!). v.in.shape is a
great start (thanks Frank!), but has some noteable limitations dealing
with polygon data (unless this has been remedied since I last looked at
it). Since my end goal is usually raster-based analysis in GRASS, the
majority of vector data that I'm interested in importing is
polygon-based.

I wish I were better able to assist in this area, but translators are
currently out of my league!

Best regards,
	-Malcolm

Malcolm D. Williamson                       malcolm at cast.uark.edu
Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies      Voice: 501-575-2734
12 Ozark Hall                                   Fax: 501-575-5218
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville AR 72701      
http://www.cast.uark.edu/


Michel Wurtz - ENGEES/CEREG wrote:
> 
> Hello Frank and Rich,
> 
> I'm not familiar with SDTS, but have worked with the people who developped
> EDIGeO, which is a french equivalent of SDTS. I presume that like any other
> Norm, this kind of data exchange format must take in account every little
> trick of every proprietary format, so it becomes a huge and unimplementable
> mess that is of course not widely used (high price and complexity of
> available implementations).  I speak mainly about EDIGeO.  I trust more
> SDTS because I believe US people are more pragmatic than French ones :-)
> 
> Besides, I think the real problem with Grass vector format is the lack of
> a good database interface for storing and managing attributes data.
> 
> I'm actually finishing (and hope to publish it for Christmas) a new
> version of m.in.e00 for Grass5.0 (some bug corrected, float
> grid format supported, and compressed format directly read).
> My only problem is "how to have a better attribute support than
> to spread all of them in a lot of cat files ?".  Gdabse, MySQL or
> Postgress : what is the best for Grass community ?
> Is there an "official" answer from Baylor people ?
> 
> I think that all of us who develop data translator programs must
> have the same approach and work together for the multiple attribute
> fields problem, and synchronize with Baylor development team.
> 
> Any answer or suggestion ?
> 
> BTW, I plan to write a v.out.e00 function : does this interest
> someone ? (apart Markus, who suggested this to me some... hmmm...
> months ago :-)
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> --
> Michel Wurtz    ENGEES - CEREG
>                 1, quai Koch - BP 1039, F-67070 STRASBOURG cedex
>                 Tel: +33 03.88.24.82.45  Fax: +33 03.88.37.04.97