Hi folks,
This question is a little off the usual database grind but as the list has been pretty quiet of late thought I'd float it. I've been looking at the ecosystem of open source spatial etl options and finding in general that the ability to throw about LRS geometry is pretty limited. I was wondering if anyone might have anything to add or refute to my musings.
In an ideal world I would like to just export and import my LRS tables like any other spatial dataset. The measure information is just another dimension - methinks it should not be a big deal. To the best of the my knowledge most of the main GIS storage formats fully support LRS geometries:
* Oracle Spatial
* PostGIS
* ESRI Shapefiles
* ESRI File Geodatabases
* Spatialite
(Note I'd rather chew a mouthful of broken glass than use shapefiles for the ETL) It seems the issue is the various ETL connections between them. To start with, Gdal's ogr engine seems to simply and straightforwardly dump all LRS information. It might be possible to fake it through by redefining the M as a Z but no idea what you'd do for XYZM. So it would seem anything using Gdal underneath is out of the question (Geokettle for example).
Does anyone have anything else open source they'd recommend or use for this type of task? Not to pick on Simon but georaptor seems to have a bug that exporting my XYM to shapefile gets forced into XYZM with the measure in the Z and the M nulled out. Also I really would prefer a portable format that was not shapefiles.
On the enterprise side I have to say that ESRI seems to have this handled - measures move back and forth without any problems I have discovered from format to format. I am rather impressed how ArcCatalog 10.2 reads and writes Spatialite so nicely - LRS and all. As a solution it seems to have things covered. That is the only way I know of at present to load LRS data into Spatialite. In contrast FME 2013 seems to just drop the M values unceremoniously when I export from Oracle to Spatialite.
So I would appreciate any thoughts you all might have on workflows you've used successfully. I know that my prejudice against shapefiles is not really useful, but I like Spatialite and it seems a nifty open format for carting around data. I really don't want all my field names truncated to 10 characters.
Cheers,
Paul