[GRASS-user] Re: import a folder full of shapefiles and reproject on-the-fly?

[Tim Michelsen]

Hello,

>> Here you can find some scripts, perhaps useful.
Thanks you for these scripts. They are really useful.

Nevertheless, I cannot get around expressing my disappointment about
GRASS in this area.
* I cannot just point the program to a directory of shapefiles and tell
it import all. QGIS, gvSIG and ArcGIS can do this.
* I cannot reproject these on the fly be changing the projection of my
location.

=> Whenever it comes to data format conversion and reprojection people
on QGIS/GRASS Maillists tend to tell the user: get your keyboard and
hack something with OGR/GDAL (Re: converting .asc to .xyz,
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.qgis.user/2519).
In clear words this means that the software is not ready, yet.
This tells me that these GIS are not made for "normal" Desktop GIS task
and mapping.
Maybe GRASS is good for some very specialised and automatisable tasks.
But to make a beautiful and printable map from a buch of data that can
be interpreted?
I was trying my best to run my current project with GRASS and FOSS4G.
But these have such severe usability issues that I cannot affort putting
the time in. Since geographical analysis also involves data aquisition
and -- later -- a interpretation I want to minimise the processing time.

I am not here to rant only. I will try to update the page on usabilty
(http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/Usability) after finishing my project.
But really, GIS is visual work with geoGRAPHICAL data.
Why did I write disappointment? Because GRASS is advertised by OSGEO as
THE most powerful free GIS that can perform any task. One must be honest
and tell, that one needs to be a programmer (at least bash) and run
linux and have a good visual imagination because of the non integrated
GUI. The above mentioned tasks are really basic GIS tasks.

Someone is devloping a GUI for OGR:
* http://inventis.ca/ogr2gui/
* http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.gdal.devel/16254
Hope that this will help for future tasks.

>> I think it is better to reproject and merge shapefiles via ogr2ogr.
>> The very trivial task (in my experience) was to clean vector after
>> import in GRASS.
>> v.clean tool=rmdupl,snap,bpol
Actually, it is not really trivivial.
GRASS freezes the computer when running the above mentioned command on a
vector that consists of merged corine land cover tiles (number of tiles
= 20).

Kind regards and thanks for your help,
Timmie