Category: Tips

gvSIG CE and Sextante workshop at the 2012 WAURISA Conference

Posted on by karstenvennemann

Introduction to gvSIG CE and geo-processing with SEXTANTE
gvSIG CE & Sextante
Terra GIS is offering a 4 hours introductory class/hands on workshop about gvSIG CE desktop GIS and Sextante at the WAURISA Conference in Tacoma on Monday May 7th, 2012, 1pm – 5pm.
gvSIG is a powerful desktop GIS system that is known for having a user-friendly interface, being able to access the most common data formats, both vector and raster ones. It features a wide range of tools for working with geographic information (query tools, layout creation, geo-processing, networks, model builder, etc.) and provides excellent cartography and spatial analysis tools, and a wide range of spatial database connectivity. gvSIG CE is the open and international version that has many extensions such Sextante (raster and vector analysis), Raster and Remote sensing, and Network analysis natively integrated.

Preparations and downloads for workshops participants:
Prior to the workshop please download and copy to your system the gvSIG CE software and the workshop data using the links below. Note that Java is needed to run gvSIG and Sextante and is included in the gvSIG CE download for Linux and Windows, but is a separate download for some Mac operating systems .

  • gvSIG CE
  • workshop data (zipped file, unzip to your hard drive)

    • Update Monday May 7th:

  • workshop slides (PDF)

    • Picture from the workshop at WAURISA:
    WAURISA 2012 - gvSIG CE workshop picture
    More information: Please contact us via email or call 206 905 1711 if you have additional questions

    Unlocking data trapped in mdb files – on Linux

    Posted on by karstenvennemann

    I thought this a nice title for this short post about getting your data out of MS Access files on Linux.
    Some weeks ago I had the task to get a schema of the US census summary files into PostgreSQL to subsequently being able to load the entire US data for those summary files (SF1 and SF3).
    Browsing census SF1 data via PgAdmin in PostgreSQL
    After some searching on the web I found schemas for those summary files in Access mdb format (SF1 template and SF3 template). Many of the tables in the summary files have well over 100 columns (see screen shoot in pgAdmin on the left hand side) and there are more than 200 tables for both summary files combined. So that was definitely not a quick “punch-the-table-schema-in-quickly” job to recreate the tables in PostgreSQL. Again searching on the web I stumbled about this post mentioning the excellent mdbtools. Great – just the right tool found in time. Since the server where the work is supposed to happen runs Ubuntu there was even no need to compile the mdb tools program at all.

    After installing mdb tools via
    sudo apt-get install mdb-schema
    I could easily export the schemas from the SF1and SF3 mdb files as SQL statements:
    mdb-schema -S sf1.mdb postgres > sf1.sql

    After running the sql files I had the schemas loaded in almost no time. On this blog there is even a python program using the mdb tools that allows you to directly extract data from mdb files into csv format – sweet.
    Have fun unlocking your data !