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Uncategorized

current tools of my trade

Mark asked: What kind of GIS software are you using?
Well, since you asked:-

  • SpatiaLite: spatial awesome built on SQLite. I love it because I don’t need to play DBA.
  • QGIS: for maps
  • ogr: for file format futzing
  • proj: for scrupulously correct (well, if I knew what I was doing …) conversion between projected and otherwise.
  • OpenOffice: for those tedious calculations
  • … and about 20 years of unix experience to mash all the results together.

All of the above are free. I’m doing this because I want to learn. Asking elsewhere hasn’t turned up anything useful.

Categories
GIS

oooOOOooh!

Now that’s a bit better. And I did it with only mild shapefile abuse.

You can load the DBF component of a shapefile into Openoffice Calc. Columns get given headers which describe their format. By pasting in the candidates column, adding the right column definition, and then resaving, you get a shapefile with today’s candidates as a new field.