[Qgis-developer] Reading a new type of file natively in QGIS

[Alex Mandel]

On 12/11/2014 08:21 PM, Pedro Camargo wrote:
> Hi group,
>                 During my discussions with people from the transportation
> modeling world, some people pointed out a few features that would be nice
> to have in order to use QGIS more intensively by our group.
> 
>                 The most important issue, however, was the possibility of
> open matrices in a very efficient way (reading matrices that are
> 10.000x10.000 in dbf format means reading 10e8 lines, which takes a VERY
> long time and defeats the purpose of using QGIS for some things.
> 
>                 A very good alternative would be using an open source
> format from the project "open model data"  (
> https://sites.google.com/site/openmodeldata/) which is based on HDF5.
> 
>                 I see that QGIS can already open raster data in HDF5
> format, but in this case, the data would be a matrix with indices and all.
> 
>                I regret to say that my programming skills, specially in
> C/C++ are not nearly good enough to evaluate the effort that it would take
> include such support and have, inside QGIS, a possibility of viewing such
> matrices, which would allow people from the transportation world (and I am
> the first volunteer) to develop the necessary plugins to manipulate the
> matrices and generate the commonly used statistics.
> 
>               Can anybody tell me what type of effort it would take and if
> it is at all of interest of the QGIS community?
> 
> Thanks a lot,
> 
> Pedro

This is more a question for GDAL/OGR I think.
How do your matrix values relate to map objects? Is your matrix a vector
or a raster?
What do you want to do with the data inside QGIS?

Thanks,
Alex