[Xastir] Setup.

[Brian D Heaton]

I'm certainly not a GIS expert, but to me it isn't really that hard. 
Its just like working the scalar and vector quantities.  If you don't
know the units of the values the data is pretty much meaningless.  Same
thing for GIS datasets.  If you don't know the datum and coordinate
system you can't work with them accurately. 

As Xastir gains more GIS functionality and continues to gain more
international users support for more datums and coordinate systems is
going to become more important.

Gerry ---

	Is it time for you to repost your datums/coordinate systems 101 message
set?  I may have a copy saved somewhere, but it makes invaluable
reading.

			THX/BDH
    

On Mon, 2004-01-19 at 15:42, Gerry Creager N5JXS wrote:
> I've got tenured professors, teaching GIS, who have no idea of what a 
> datum is.  I was RIF'd from the Forest Science's GIS operation because 
> they couldn't find a need for a geodesist to keep 'em straight.  Even 
> when they could charge projects for my time, at a significantly higher 
> rate than they paid, they didn't understand a lot of the issues.
> 
> One particular prof prefers to do all his workin NAD27, because he's 
> "familiar" with it.  However, he has discovered GPS, although he's been 
> heard to complain that those Trimble GeoExplorer products weren't very 
> good because they didn't match well to his maps...
> 
> Go figure.
> gerry
> 
> Brian D Heaton wrote:
> > Gerry,
> > 
> > 	Yep on both counts.  I still have nasty flashbacks to a Homeland
> > Defense project I did with consolidating a bunch of GIS data from
> > various entities.  The majority of it was shapefiles.  Four or five of
> > the agencies that provided them actually had no idea what datum they
> > were in.
> > 
> > 			THX/BDH
> > 
> > 
> > On Mon, 2004-01-19 at 14:45, Gerry Creager N5JXS wrote:
> > 
> >>Virtually *ALL* the .e00 files can be converted to .shp: .e00 is the 
> >>ESRI Exchange Format.  If GDAL is up and working, then, yes, 
> >>libproj/proj4 can be bypassed.  Otherwise, you're stuck with all sorts 
> >>of interesting possibilities for .shp projection formats: Shapefiles 
> >>don't tell you what projection they're in natively.
> >>
> >>gerry
> >>
> >>Brian D Heaton wrote:
> >>
> >>>On Mon, 2004-01-19 at 12:23, Curt, WE7U wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>>If he's not in the U.S., he may not have much of a need for the
> >>>>libgeotiff stuff anyway.  There may not be any maps available for
> >>>>the area.
> >>>>
> >>>>I'd suggest Shapelib and ImageMagick only.  Skip the libproj/
> >>>>libgeotiff/ libgdal stuff for now unless specific maps that those
> >>>>libraries support are needed.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>I wasn't 100% sure whether or not proj was needed for the UI-View maps. 
> >>>I did a quick search and found some E00 format maps that could be
> >>>converted over to shape files.  Everything else looks like commercial
> >>>data.
> >>>
> >>>			THX/BDH
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>>-----------------------------------------------------------------
> >>>>Curt, WE7U			    archer at eskimo dot com
> >>>>Arlington, WA, USA		http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
> >>>>"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
> >>>>"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
> >>>>"The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>_______________________________________________
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