Added tool that generates shapefiles from hazard/loss maps

[al-maisan]

Lars,

this is the review I have been threatening you with :-)

When the OpenQuake engine finishes a calculation job we will present hazard/loss maps in shapefile format to the geonode server since this appears to be the optimal way to interact with the latter.

Hence the need for a tool that reads hazard/loss maps and generates the corresponding shapefiles.

The shapefile generator tool added in this branch completely side-steps any kind of XML-based parsing and -- assuming the wellformedness of the hazard/loss maps -- extracts the positions as well as the values of interest via regular expressions.

I have tested the tool by generating shapefiles from hazard/loss maps stemming from smoketest runs and viewing them in the http://thuban.intevation.org/ tool.

[feuchner]

Hi Muharem, hi all,

I have tested the tool by generating shapefiles from hazard/loss maps stemming from smoketest runs and viewing them in the http://thuban.intevation.org/ tool.

For portrayal of Shapefiles and other GIS data formats (also from DB and WMS/WFS) I recommend using Quantum GIS. Thuban doesn't seem to be very popular (at least I've never heard of it before reading your mail), and also it seems that it's not under active development any longer. If it works for your purposes so far, fine, but seems to be kind of a "dead end".

Cheers, Fab

[al-maisan]

Hello Fabian,

thanks for the pointer, I was merely using thuban to check whether the shapefiles generated were any good i.e. for visual inspection.

Also, thanks for your advice (re. loss maps and shapefiles) last Saturday, that helped a lot !!

[al-maisan]

Lars, I did not know how to test the shapefile generator funtions but did refactor and test all the other code as you suggested.

[larsbutler]

LGTM