More integration with GIS

[ole]

It would be good to allow ANUGA direct access to GIS files such as shape files, GML, KML and so on. This should probably be done through the GDAL library.

Other tools that are based on GDAL are Quantum GIS (​http://www.qgis.org/) and ogr2ogr (​http://www.gdal.org/ogr/ogr2ogr.html).

Quantum GIS is very promising as it allows very easy creation of polygons and has a light simple interface. It is unknown how well qgis handles projections.

Ogr2ogr is commandline driven and can convert most formats. Two important examples are

ogr2ogr -f "GML" map_area.gml map_area.shp

which creates a gml file from a shape file. That file can easily be converted to csv if needed (however, it would be better to read the GDAL formats directly).

ogr2ogr -f "KML" -t_srs WGS84 bay_area.kml bay_area.shp

which converts a shape file in UTM coordinates to kml in WGS84 for use with Google Earth.

First task in this ticket will be to see if Python can get direct access to the underlying libraries. One, called pymod, ships with ogr2ogr. DGAL may be the same thing, but I am not sure.