Dear Kjell,
1. Is there any *.prj file attached to the shapefile?
2. If not - what are the common SRS systems used in Norway? Can you find any
data in those Norwegian SRSs? If you find the data load it and check whether
it overlaps with your shapefile. If you find one that does, you will know
the right SRS. Then you can either write a *.prj file yourself or give the
EPSG code of the SRS (both to be found in http://spatial-rference.org )
within the GeoConverter.
Regarding:
"I would also love to get
some feedback on possible scenarios and methods of extracting what I
need (i.e. coastline, counties, primary and secondary roads,
footpaths, rivers/lakes and railroads) and turning it into open data
files that can be openly converted and plotted using gnuplot."
You have to be very carefull before you make the derivatives of that
shapefile public. Is that source public? Who is the owner of the data? What
are the conditions of use?
Kind regards:
Raf
Dr. Rafal Wawer
K.U.Leuven
R&D Division SADL (Spatial Application Division)
Celestijnenlaan 200e bus 2224
BE-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
Belgium
tel. 0032 16 329731
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kjell Are Refsvik" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "OSGeo Discussions" <discuss@lists.osgeo.org>; "Andrew Turner"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2008 12:08 PM
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Shapefile lacking SRS information
Den 3. sep.. 2008 kl. 19.34 skrev Andrew Turner:
You have a couple of options - one would be to just rasterize and
register/geo-rectify the image and then trace or use as a basemap.
Curiously, what is your goal with this data? Can you instead use other
base maps such as OpenStreetMap (either as vector or rendered tiles)?
Oh, yes. I would love to use OSM vector data, but first let me tell
you a little bit more about my project.
My thesis are trying to address the current technical challenges and
opportunities we experience relating to digital photographs and I have
documented numerous of both. While for the most part a study of
literature - my thesis also ends with a small software project where I
will try to suggest a method (and associated tools) for presenting and
sharing digital images that hopefully will do 3 things
1:Focus on the importance and existence of embedded metadata inside
image-files so that more people can start using them,
2:The importance of the capture and use of context in general and more
specifically location (as in the stuff grabbed by a GPS and ingested
in Photos as lon/lat/alt/datum) as many people find location to be key
to data like photographs, and
3: presenting it all in ways that makes it likely to survive for a
long time.
Supported by the fact that the National Library currently does its
best to harvest the entire .no domain 2 times a year, I want to make a
web-album software that writes standards-compliant HTML/CSS code, and
also embeds maps of where they are taken into the album. This is a
fairly recent sketch:
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/misc/20080902_programming_goal.jpg
The idea is that a user would use my script to generate a web-album
from a group of JPEGs - hopefully geotagged and ready to be accessible
- hopefully for a long time. Once put online (on a .no domain site)
and harvested by the Nation Library, Its likelyhood of ever being
completely lost should be significantly reduced, containing everything
(images, thumbs, overview/detailed maps and code) it needs to work.
Many people are using mash-ups and data from sources like GoogleMaps
to do the same thing today - but my claim is that such a solution is
not very likely to be stable in the long run as online services have a
relatively short life-span and will eventually move, change or die.
But solutions like Flickr does all this today and includes even maps,
you might say. True - but online archiving solutions like the Internet
Archive/WayBackMachine has shown that large complex online services is
hard to archive and its size may also be a challenge for archiving
solutions out there. Wanting to control my own data and make it easy
to move it around to meet future needs have made me to come up with
this alternative solution.
In my efforts to complete this project, I have wanted to use
platforms, software and data that are open sourced and/or freely
available to ensure that it can easily be moved, changed, and/or
freely developed further as users see fit. I am open to to any
suggestions in terms of tools and data sources, but have for now used
the 22 year old gnuplot sofware and the equally old (or even more?)
UNIX platform to present my solution. In my opinion, these choices as
tried and tested software/platforms and is as likely to survive for
the next decades as any other. With its open strategy and fairly well
documented command-set, UNIX itself could be seen as a development
environment. It should be relatively easy for other people with only
rudimentary programming skills (like myself) to open up my script and
use or modify it and no compilation is necessary to run it, even
further reducing complexity.
My initial thought was to try to extract data from OpenStreetMap, but
failing to do so, I had to opt for data from the Norwegian Mapping and
Cadastre Authority (www.statkart.no). Having very little knowledge
about geodata going into this, I will at this point have to limit my
ambitions and proceed with the data I have. Having access to a open
data source would have been and nice touch though, and made the map
data source fit in very well with my other open technology-choices in
this project. However - being on a fairly tight schedule, I think I
have to opt for the second best thing at this point, and file the
desire for open geodata-source under "Future works".
Currently I am at the stage where I have converted a shapefile
containing Norwegian municipalities to a basic text-file that gnuplot
can draw:
...
10.460277557373047 60.025833129882812
10.472221374511719 60.025833129882812
10.487220764160156 60.020828247070312
#Buskerud
8.190235137939453 61.079093933105469
8.203887939453125 61.093887329101562
8.212221145629883 61.100273132324219
8.273332595825195 61.074996948242188
...
but I am looking for ways to add a better map with more resolution and
features to improve the user experience. Having located a more
detailed shapefile from a friend, (the request you got), I realized
that the file was lacking information about SRS and that I needed this
information to be able to convert the data to lon/lat/wgs84 (so that
the map can be plotted in the same reference system as the images):
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/misc/20080903_GeoConverter.png
Any information helpful to the conversion of the shapefile to a lon/
lat/wgs84 SRS would be greatly appreciated. I would also love to get
some feedback on possible scenarios and methods of extracting what I
need (i.e. coastline, counties, primary and secondary roads,
footpaths, rivers/lakes and railroads) and turning it into open data
files that can be openly converted and plotted using gnuplot.
A current screenshot of the maps that are plotted can be found here:
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/misc/20080903_makemap2.png
...and the script itself as of today is here:
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/misc/20080903_makemap2.sh
Sincerely,
Kjell Are Refsvik
Graduate Student, Information Technology
Faculty of Computer Sciences
Østfold University College, Norway
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
mobile: +47 405 50 454
On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 3:39 AM, Rafal Wawer
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Dear Kjell,
I am not an expert with GRASS, but form what I see in your e-mail, the
shapefile itself (its geometry) seem to be OK. It si just lacking the
SRS
informaton.
In Quantum GIS often (always?) happens, that the program does not read
the
ESRI WKT from *.prj file, hence you have to read it yourself and find
the
corresponding EPSG code on http://spatial-reference.org . Then you
define it
within layer's properties and that's it. I bet, there is similiar
procedure
in GRASS.
Hope this helps a bit.
Best regards:
RAf
Dr. Rafal Wawer
K.U.Leuven
R&D Division SADL (Spatial Application Division)
Celestijnenlaan 200e bus 2224
BE-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
Belgium
tel. 0032 16 329731
----- Original Message ----- From: "Kjell Are Refsvik"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "OSGeo Discussions" <discuss@lists.osgeo.org>
Sent: Monday, September 01, 2008 5:51 PM
Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] Shapefile lacking SRS information
Hi,
We communicated briefly this summer on issues relating to the
conversion and creation of geodata. Looking through the emails from
earlier this summer, I am very thankful for the time you spent, and
hope that I am not intruding by asking one more:
My status is that I am progressing to the point where I should be able
to draw my own maps and have them included (mashed) with my web albums
for photos soon.
I am using UNIX shell-scripts to draw the maps I need based on a
shapefile converted to .csv and geodata extracted from my photos:
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/misc/20080829_gnuplot_status.png
Trying to get hold of better maps, I have been trying to get some old
shapefiles to work, but without success. They appear to have lost
their Spacial Reference System:
http://www.ia-stud.hiof.no/~kjellare/misc/20080901_SRS.png
...and I was just wondering - is it possible to repair them?
Best regards,
Kjell Are Refsvik
-----
Graduate Student, Information Technology
Faculty of Computer Sciences
Østfold University College, Norway
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
mobile: +47 405 50 454
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Kjell Are Refsvik
-----
Mastergradsstudent, Informasjonsteknologi
Avdeling for Informasjonsteknologi
Høgskolen i Østfold
e-post: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
mobil: +47 405 50 454
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