[Qgis-user] Public Sector Mapping Agreement

[Andrew Chapman]

Hi Brent
The PSMA potentially opens the opportunity to introduce GIS to about 10k
lowest tier UK government organisations (parish and town councils). These
are run by volunteers with generally limited time and normally not a lot of
computing experience beyond a word processor and photo editor. If this type
of person is presented with a long and tortuous route to setup and evaluate
GIS, it just will not happen. 
I realise that some of the QGIS community may feel that if users cannot
demonstrate abilities and determination above a certain level then they
shouldn’t be encouraged to get involved, but is that a widely held view? 
We know that a .gz is just a compressed .gml file, but in my case it took a
while to find out. Yes, we could tell people to uncompress the file and
leave them to find how
 but this just adds one more (admittedly small)
hurdle for them to pass.
Possibly a way round this would be a plug-in to wrap up the (to a new user)
complexity. Once we have a new user up and running, they can develop skills
over time.
Just my thoughts


Andrew 
________________________________________
From: pcreso at pcreso.com [mailto:pcreso at pcreso.com] 
Sent: 27 March 2011 18:54
To: 'Noli Sicad'; Andrew Chapman
Cc: qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: RE: [Qgis-user] Public Sector Mapping Agreement

Hi Andrew,

A gz file is simply a zip file containing compressed files. In this case
compressed GML files. On Linux, gunzip <file.gz> will extract them, on
Windows most unzipping utilities will decompress & extract the contents.

The uncompressed files do not appear to have a gml suffix, but if QGIS is
set to open "all files" instead of just a specified type, it can determine
the file type from the file contents & open them using OGR.
 
I don't see any reason for QGIS to work wth compressed archive files
directly, users can easily extract the contents & then open with QGIS.

OGR can convert to shapefiles, or load into a database, but neither of these
is a QGIS specific role, and I'm not sure a QGIS howto is the appropriate
place for an introduction to spatial data mgmt. This would be better done by
pointing at a PostGIS tutorial.

Cheers

Brent Wood

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