Chapter 3. Combining Multiple Data Sources
Geographic data tends to be heterogeneous. Just to cite a few factors that contribute to this heterogeneity, it may come from different sources, have been produced at different times, or even have different languages. Given this fact, writing programs that can combine multiple sources of data is a fundamental topic in geoprocessing.
Data sources may come in different formats, such as shapefiles, text files, Google KML files, GPX files from GPS, and so on. They may also vary in their contents; for example, they may have different types of geometries, coordinate systems, and attributes.
In this chapter, we will enhance our application by adding the capability to combine multiple sources of data from both different sites and different file formats. In order to achieve this, we will write code capable of identifying the type of data, and depending on this, we will make transformations to obtain a homogeneous set of data.
By extending OGR capabilities...
