I've been experimenting with a lot of geo-based projects over the past couple of years, and something I've been wondering quite a bit lately:
Why is the projection ID(SRID/EPSG) situation so horrendously bad?
As far as I can tell, the only way to take a Shapefile and figure out the proper SRID number, is to take the .proj4 file and run it through an API like http://www.prj2epsg.org/search (which spent some number of weeks down earlier this year, and I haven't tried again to see if the API is back up).
It's funny, because you can't actually take in map data
in PostGIS without the SRID properly set, and yet there's no reliable way to get the number, so working with multiple projection datasets is just... not possible unless you manually do the conversions?
Honestly, if I could get the data that the API above has, I'd run the service myself to at least make it reliable, even though it requires a lookup. But there should be a better system, somehow.
Why is the projection ID(SRID/EPSG) situation so horrendously bad?
As far as I can tell, the only way to take a Shapefile and figure out the proper SRID number, is to take the .proj4 file and run it through an API like http://www.prj2epsg.org/search (which spent some number of weeks down earlier this year, and I haven't tried again to see if the API is back up).
It's funny, because you can't actually take in map data in PostGIS without the SRID properly set, and yet there's no reliable way to get the number, so working with multiple projection datasets is just... not possible unless you manually do the conversions?
Honestly, if I could get the data that the API above has, I'd run the service myself to at least make it reliable, even though it requires a lookup. But there should be a better system, somehow.