[postgis-users] Question on datum names

[Peter Baumann]

Peter-

in OGC (www.opengeospatial.org) we are just about to establish a standard for 
such conventions in a machine-readable way. This is a so-called "CRS Name Type 
Specification" defines URLs as identifiers for CRSs and CRS axes for now. More 
ingredients, such as datums, probably will follow in future. This standard will 
allow for a uniform, interoperable addressing scheme.

If you are interested I can post some preliminary information. The candidate OGC 
CRS resolver, SECORE, is in beta accessible at http://www.earthlook.org/ -> 
demos -> CRS resolver. It is Open Source as part of the array analytics server, 
rasdaman (www.rasdaman.org).

cheers,
Peter




On 05/29/2012 11:45 PM, Peter N. Schweitzer wrote:
> On the web site from which I distribute spatial data, I provide shapefiles
> with projection information as a .prj file.  I've drawn the contents of
> these prj files from the srtext field of the spatial_ref_sys table.
>
> A user has pointed out to me that this is inconvenient for people running
> ArcGIS because ArcGIS expects to see different values as the name of the
> coordinate system and the datum.  I have not seen a standard that specifies
> these names.  Is there one?
>
> It looks like I could change my .prj files to fit ArcGIS without much trouble.
> But would this change break other applications?  Are there GIS applications
> other than ArcGIS that rely strongly on these names?  How do others support
> portability of projection information in downloadable data using the shapefile
> format?
>
> Peter

-- 
Dr. Peter Baumann
  - Professor of Computer Science, Jacobs University Bremen
    www.faculty.jacobs-university.de/pbaumann
    mail: p.baumann at jacobs-university.de
    tel: +49-421-200-3178, fax: +49-421-200-493178
  - Executive Director, rasdaman GmbH Bremen (HRB 26793)
    www.rasdaman.com, mail: baumann at rasdaman.com
    tel: 0800-rasdaman, fax: 0800-rasdafax, mobile: +49-173-5837882
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