Map Data Converters

Simple data converters

It is bizarrely difficult to convert map data between formats. It shouldn't be.

When I started working with mapdata, I discovered that it is very difficult to convert map data from one format to another. The programs that try to do it tend to work badly, for instance, they try to read the entire source file into memory before writing the output file. This does not work when the source file is 50Gb and my laptop only has 3Gb of memory.

Naturally there are many other programs that convert data, but they are often difficult to install, and don't have the features that I want. So naturally I wrote my own. These are all easy to "install", all you need to do is compile and run. And they are open source so you can customise them how you like. Patches and pull requests welcome!

The main feature of these programs is that they can read data, one line at a time, from compressed files, process it, and write the results into another compressed file.

Programs

• Geotools