[Qgis-user] How to store spatial information of various geometry types (point, line, polygon) in one place?

[Brent Wood]

I agree - that approach to managing spatial data was last century's one.


I recommend you use a spatially enabled database to manage spatial data . as many geometries/geographies as you want per feature.

We have polygons with a point label location, linestrings with start finish timestamps as well as start, finish and mid points.

>From a traditional GIS centric perspective the coords defining the spatial representation of an entity has a special place - they are the entity, & the other attributes just hang of it. A fundamentally flawed model according to good data management practices.

A good RDBMS stores a spatial representation value as just another attribute, you can have as many geometry, date/time, numeric or text fields describing your real world entity as you like... enablind spatial data to be corecvctly modelled & managed. Pretty much all GIS tools these days support connecting to an external spatial database as an alternative to an internal database or file based system. 


I prefer Postgis, but MySQL/MariaDB, or even the free versions of SQL Server & Oracle support the OGC SFS standard, which, amongst other things, defines an approach for storing simple spatial features in a RDBMS.

If you want a cloud based approach - Amazon cloud supports Postgres, you can establish a database, install Postgis & insert your data, configuring the Postgres server to allow access from your systems as you require via IP afddress & user name.  


Cheers,

  Brent



________________________________
 From: kilolima <kilolima at imap.cc>
To: qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org 
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2014 8:39 AM
Subject: [Qgis-user] How to store spatial information of various geometry types (point, line, polygon) in one place?
 

Hi All,

For work, we use a Google Sheets spreadsheet that is accessible to various
people. The spreadsheet is mostly text attribute data with spatial
information stored in WKT fields (points and polylines). When it comes time
to make a map, I download a csv and import into QGIS. I realized that the
csv import process will only allow one geometry type during the import and
discard the others. This results in having to repeat the import process for
each geometry type in the csv.

Is there some better way to do this, ideally that would allow text and
spatial data of various geometry types to be stored and read all at once? Is
there a way to get around the seemingly archaic separation of vector layers
based on geometry types? Is there a native QGIS format that can handle this
and import from a spreadsheet?

Or, ideally, is there some sort of magical connector between Google Sheets
and QGIS, so a change online in Sheets would update the map in QGIS?

cheers,

kilolima



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