Lessons of Event Data Format Design

Sean Gillies — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 15:37:41 GMT

Read https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2018/08/30/Event-Structure and follow the link to the "SEF theorem" https://github.com/inlined/versioningishard/ if you're into data format design. Everything about this blog post applies equally well to the spatial data domain. If you've ever encountered GeoJSON features with styling directives mixed in with other feature attributes, you've witnessed the problem of trying to make unstructured GeoJSON data consistent with structured data (Shapefiles or whatever).

GeoJSON in Your Clipboard

Sean Gillies — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 13:38:05 GMT

One of the best properties of a text format, maybe the best property, is how easily it can cross application boundaries.

Cool, @QGIS can copy features to the clipboard as GeoJSON - even converts coordinates to WGS84 for you! (Settings→Options→Data Sources) pic.twitter.com/igLdEiA8yr
— AJ (@aj_ashton) November 2, 2017

I'm in the midst of training myself to automatically use pbcopy and pbpaste on my Mac command line and have yet another example of how readily GeoJSON travels. After exporting GeoJSON from QGIS to your Mac's clipboard or paste buffer, you could also send it directly to http://geojson.io using either the Node.js geojsonio-cli or Python geojsonio – by Jacob Wasserman, with additional Pandas and Jupyter integration features, a must-have Python module for my line of work – packages:

pbpaste | geojsonio

From your Qt GUI to the operating system clipboard, to the command line, to the web, and back to another GUI in your browser. As I keep saying, GeoJSON was never about replacing shapefiles in traditional GIS workflows; the format was intended to afford new methods and new workflows not easy or not possible with shapefiles and databases.

Sean Gillies (Posts about formats)

Lessons of Event Data Format Design

GeoJSON in Your Clipboard