I have a polygon shape file that has lat & lon fields for the centroid (the polygons are simple rectangles). I'd like to write a simple batch process to read those lat-lon fields and create a point shape file that also includes all the other attributes. I'd like to keep this as simple as possible, so I figured I could use ogr2ogr.
It sounds like I need to set up a Virtual Spatial Data file. The "Virtual Spatial Data (ODBC/OVF)" MapServer document says that I could use an ODBC connection after setting up a DSN. I have unixODBC installed on a RedHat server, but I don't see a dbf/dbase driver, and I can't find one either in the unixODBC home page. Alternatively, I could try to export the dbf to a text file (say, csv), using something like the dbflist utility (part of the dbf2info utilities; I've never used them, but I assume I can set them up!). The MapServer document seems to imply that I could then set up an OVF to link directly to flat text files without an ODBC DSN, but I can't find any examples; I only see ODBC examples. Any advice on what's the easiest approach to accomplish this? Thanks! -Emilio Mayorga
