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| Subject: | RE: GISList: I concede! .E00 is not the best - its only what you
get! |
| Date: |
01/13/2002 12:02:59 AM |
| From: |
Neil Havermale |
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Rant on! I know well the frustration of not being able to afford the ESRI
solution for seemingly simple data transfer. Try Blue Marble....
Back in the days when ESRI alternatives were just about nil due to the
Sun-ESRI-Oracle lock on GIS workstations, yes, it was more than frustrating
to be trying to use a new-comer GIS like MapInfo to do on a $5000 PC what
others needed $80,000 to do. My/our/your frustration then comes from the
discovery that all the data you were looking for was "available". You jump
straight to how great desktop mapping could be - rising expectations. You
watch the post for your data (in the old days when a hotrod modem kicked out
2400b).
But reality stops you dead in your tracks: the E00 file that was recorded to
3.5' floppy is in an impossible UNIX disk format - "Gosh, our office doesn't
have a PC yet. I have a friend who just got one, maybe he can help". Two
days turns into two weeks. You and your squad of friendly data translators
get the file on a DOS disk (yes, we all learned quite a lot) only to find
that the WinTel E00 translator was not up to the task. The developer
responding "I didn't have that version of ArcInfo" - more UNIX vs.
DOS/Windows head-banging. Get that figured out only discover "topology"
differences between arcnode and spatial object design plus the old problem
of geographic objects versus tabular data. That was almost a decade ago and
despite all the "OpenGIS" noise and posturing since apparently little has
changed.
ESRI's inability to enable easy data translation is not new. Those who live
on a GIS budget and really don't care about others who don't look up from
their feeding trough and point a jab at SDTS as a "open" public format and
what a joke that was. Bluntly, SDTS did and does work as long as the
exporting utility "does it by the book" which certain GIS leadership decided
to interpret their own way. Just ask some of the old hands a USGS about
ESRI's formatting of SDTS.....
Lastly, we are/were very excited about the potential of SHP up to the point
we were missing projection and datum information - whoops! Seems so simple?
I too am not a geographer but I do dig the neat things GIS can do in space.
Over the years, I have found that if an ESRI license is involved in the
source data do not expect much to go smoothly. Make certain you know the
update on the ESRI tools as well as your translator tool. Its also smart to
make certain that the pending SHP or E00 data does in fact have a TXT file
of metadata.
I am no rookie to this issue. After nearly twenty years of desktop mapping
I have discovered only those who do not get out much deem ESRI tools to be
the best. Further, I have discovered buy hard-knock and burnt fingers that
if you can cause any company or data supplier to provide a MIF/MID
translation, then your spatial data is then readily transferable to any GIS
platform including all of the emerging ESRI 8+ products.
Its simply AkeInfo or AkeView and that is the way it is. Get over it! You
want real fear in your heart - I have a friend who saw Bill and Jack getting
off a private elevator in LA just prior to Jack's delivery to the
workstation GIS-nerds that VisualBasic would soon be a part of their
future..... Yeah - VB is open too!
I feel a lot better now.....
MidNight Mapper
aka neil
-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Smyrl [mailto:Stephen_Smyrl@telus.net\
Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2002 12:09 PM
To: Robert Heitzman
Cc: gislist@geocomm.com: Manifold-L@lists.directionsmag.com
Subject: Re: GISList: I concede! .E00 Rules!
I think one of the major points in this thread is that data translation is
the
key.
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