Data Formats - Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools - page 86

v.in.e00
Imports an ArcInfo export file . e00 to GRASS format
v.in.garmin
Downloads waypoints, routes, and tracks from a Garmin GPS
receiver into a vector map
v.in.gpsbabel
Downloads waypoints, routes, and tracks from a GPS receiver or
a GPS ASCII file into a vector map using formats supported by
gpsbabel
v.in.ogr
Converts OGR-supported formats into a GRASS vector map
You can see from the list of commands that there are a lot of options for
getting your data into GRASS. In fact, we didn't list all of them for you,
just some of the major ones. For exporting data out of GRASS, there
are also a lot of options. We won't list them here, but in case you're
curious, the commands are all of the form r.out.* for rasters and v.out.*
for vectors.
PostGIS Conversion
If you choose PostGIS, it supports the loading of data using SQL and the
importing/exporting of shapefiles using shp2pgsql and pgsql2shp . We'll
take a look at these two utilities in Section 11.4 , PostGIS, on page 203 .
If your source data isn't in shapefile format, you can still import it—you
just need a little extra power. In this case, you need to use the Swiss
Army knife of conversion tools.
The Swiss Army Knife
Just as you wouldn't go out into the wilderness without your Swiss
Army knife (or maybe bug spray), venturing into the world of data con-
version without the GDAL/OGR utilities is not advised. These utilities
provide conversion between file-based vector and raster formats, as well
as spatial databases.
We take an in-depth look at these tools in Chapter 11 , Using Command-
Line Tools, on page 174 . For now just keep these two commands in the
back of your mind: ogr2ogr and gdal_translate .