Hi Brent The PSMA potentially opens the opportunity to introduce GIS to about 10k lowest tier UK government organisations (parish and town councils). These are run by volunteers with generally limited time and normally not a lot of computing experience beyond a word processor and photo editor. If this type of person is presented with a long and tortuous route to setup and evaluate GIS, it just will not happen. I realise that some of the QGIS community may feel that if users cannot demonstrate abilities and determination above a certain level then they shouldnt be encouraged to get involved, but is that a widely held view? We know that a .gz is just a compressed .gml file, but in my case it took a while to find out. Yes, we could tell people to uncompress the file and leave them to find how but this just adds one more (admittedly small) hurdle for them to pass. Possibly a way round this would be a plug-in to wrap up the (to a new user) complexity. Once we have a new user up and running, they can develop skills over time. Just my thoughts
Andrew ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 27 March 2011 18:54 To: 'Noli Sicad'; Andrew Chapman Cc: [email protected] Subject: RE: [Qgis-user] Public Sector Mapping Agreement Hi Andrew, A gz file is simply a zip file containing compressed files. In this case compressed GML files. On Linux, gunzip <file.gz> will extract them, on Windows most unzipping utilities will decompress & extract the contents. The uncompressed files do not appear to have a gml suffix, but if QGIS is set to open "all files" instead of just a specified type, it can determine the file type from the file contents & open them using OGR. I don't see any reason for QGIS to work wth compressed archive files directly, users can easily extract the contents & then open with QGIS. OGR can convert to shapefiles, or load into a database, but neither of these is a QGIS specific role, and I'm not sure a QGIS howto is the appropriate place for an introduction to spatial data mgmt. This would be better done by pointing at a PostGIS tutorial. Cheers Brent Wood ________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Qgis-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user
