So you are working with geospatial data. You are collaborating with several people on the same dataset. People in your team are on different OS (Mac, Win or Linux) and want to use different geospatial tools, like QGIS, GPlates, GMT, OpenJUMP or ArcGIS or Matlab as they all have different requirements and used to different workflows in their geoscientific research. You would like to keep track of the changes made to that specific dataset and snapshot it at different stages – ideally through SVN, git or any other revisioning tool. You don't have any money and probably even less time.
So (unless I am mistaken) there are some options right at hand:
Strangely, in 2012 there seems to be not a single “open”, non-binary file format which can be edited and read across the whole FOSS and proprietary GIS world - at least to my knowledge. A potential candidate, with little overhead is the GMT OGR format (see the documentation in the GMT5 cookbook - PDF file link here, which is produced by ogr2ogr
, when converting shapefiles to GMT's plain text format. So I guess this is what I will be doing:
One could potentially write a Python script to do this in Arc but running ogr2ogr on the command line once shouldn't be too hard…