[Mapserver-users] OT: vmap0 text?

[Tyler Mitchell]

Hi Nick,
You asked the right question at the right time :)
You want this: http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/cntry_files.html
Tab delimited files for the whole planet.  Millions of points over the earth, 
with fairly good accuracy (limited by precision of decimal degree lat/longs).

I'm working on loading all the places into a PostGIS database and making it 
available through a WFS.  If you do anything with the global one, let me 
know, so I don't waste too much more time :)

Current ogr has a draft comma delimited file driver (CSV format) which I 
bastardized to handle tab delimiters instead.  It worked fairly well on this 
file.

Email me off list if you want more information or to swap strategies of 
handling the 700MB+ global text file.

Tyler

On Thursday 29 July 2004 16:31, Nick Johnson wrote:
> Is anyone familiar with the placement and format of text in the VMAP0
> format? I've converted it all to shapefile format, but I'm trying to
> seperate out country, region, city, town and place names, and can't seem
> to achieve that. Multiple layers have text, but there seems to be no
> distinction between the different types of label. Also, mapsever seems
> to display labels selectively - phystxt seems to have country names
> (repeated several times!), but when I tell mapserver to display them, it
> instead displays other labels with similar coordinates and skips the
> country names altogether. Does anyone have advice on how to seperate out
> the different levels of name?
> Also, names seem to be in upper-case for the most part. Can anyone point
> me to a tool for turning these into Initial Caps?
> Alternatively, does anyone know where I can get a (free) database of
> placenames?
>
> -Nick Johnson
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