[GPlates-discuss] GPlates and linking to databases

Eglington, Bruce bruce.eglington at usask.ca
Sat Apr 28 06:57:49 AEST 2018


Hi Christian
  Thanks for the suggestions.

Separate from the database issue, can you explain how to make a mid ocean ridge stay equally spaced between two continents or oceanic plates? I assumed that one would link the MOR line to one of the adjacent PlateID's and specify the other adjacent PlateID as the conjugate plate but that does not seem to work. I have also tried to link the adjacent plates as LeftPlate and RightPlate but also no joy.

Any suggestions will be a great help as none of the tutorials seem to explain this, at least not in a way that makes sense to me.

Bruce


Bruce Eglington (Ph.D.)
Murray Pyke Chair
Geological Sciences
University of Saskatchewan
114 Science Place
Saskatoon
SK
S7N 5E2
Canada

bruce.eglington at usask.ca<mailto:bruce.eglington at usask.ca>
+1-306-966-5732

From: GPlates-discuss [mailto:gplates-discuss-bounces at mailman.sydney.edu.au] On Behalf Of Christian.Heine at shell.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 7, 2018 09:28
To: gplates-discuss at mailman.sydney.edu.au
Subject: Re: [GPlates-discuss] GPlates and linking to databases

Hi Bruce,

AFAIK there is no such capability, unless you'd count hooking up to a WFS server as one.

We had discussions a few years back of linking to PostGIS, but also we recently talked about the new OGC Geopackage standard (being sqlite-based I would also classify this as database, see geopackage.org) but so far this has not matured further (I think).  In theory the implementation should be relative straightforward as GPlates is already using the GDAL library (which reads PostGIS, sqlite, geopackage etc). However, the complications come in when turning relatively arbitrary database attributes/columns into the GPlates feature model (GPGIM).

I suppose some way you could go about this (thinking out loud)could be a crude combination of pyGPlates (or even using the built in Python shell) together with either the GDAL python library or something like psycopg2 to connect to your (geospatial) database (for some older project I used psycopg2+postgis/postgresql with GMT quite successfully). However, this will also require you to map the feature you import to the GPGIM. You could write some script to write out native GPML files from your DB as well to avoid the "lossy" shapefile format (ie col header truncation if > 12 chars, 255 char limits in attributes etc etc) which is the only way to bridge the ESRI world with GPlates currently.

I would very much support any effort to get GPlates and the GPGIM to read from DBs as this would also help a lot to improve the interface to commonly used GIS tools, especially in the corporate environment which somehow doesn't like open formats.

Not sure if John & co will have some surprises in this direction in the upcoming 2.1 release.

Cheers,
Christian


From: GPlates-discuss [mailto:gplates-discuss-bounces at mailman.sydney.edu.au] On Behalf Of Eglington, Bruce
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2018 3:55 PM
To: 'gplates-discuss at mailman.sydney.edu.au' <gplates-discuss at mailman.sydney.edu.au<mailto:gplates-discuss at mailman.sydney.edu.au>>
Subject: [GPlates-discuss] GPlates and linking to databases

Good day
  Is there currently any design capability to link to tables or queries in any form of database already built in to GPlates or are the only data input options ROT, GPML, SHP, NETCDF and various raster formats? If not currently available, are there any plans to add database capabilities in the foreseeable  future?

Regards
   Bruce

Bruce Eglington (Ph.D.)
Murray Pyke Chair
Geological Sciences
University of Saskatchewan
114 Science Place
Saskatoon
SK
S7N 5E2
Canada

bruce.eglington at usask.ca<mailto:bruce.eglington at usask.ca>
+1-306-966-5732

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.sydney.edu.au/pipermail/gplates-discuss/attachments/20180427/3f744255/attachment.html>


More information about the GPlates-discuss mailing list