Oz,
I have been using your GNIS Process to get POI's for washington State. However, in comparing what is put into the gnis shapefile, and what is available from the USGS website, I am seeing that a large number of POI's aren't making it into the shapefile.
Is there somewhere you have documented exactly what the GNIS process does in downloading, and processing the data? I would like to try to troubleshoot and see what is happening.
I think I figured it out. It appears that the GPSFileDepot GNIS Process downloads the "State Download Files" which does not contain all of the POI's that are available for the state. In my particular instance, it only contains ~140 summits, when there are over 2000 available when searching just for summits.
So if at all possible I would like to use the USGS GNIS search page and download the results as a pipe delimited file. I can do that very easily. What I cannot figure out is how to get the data processed into a shp or mp file to compile in my map. I need a process to convert the lat/long in DMS (as a string, e.g. 471514N, 1272724W) as it comes from the USGS into decimal degrees to import into global mapper. Or a process using FWTools and PostGIS to convert to geometric points in the database that can then be converted to shapfiles (like the NHD or transportation data).
Essentially, I want to manually do what GNIS Process does automatically. Can you help me Oz?
Very interesting that it doesn't include all the summits; I knew it didn't include a couple "types" but it was supposed to include all the features of the other types. It gets them from this page: http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/download_data.htm
On the other hand if you're working with the pipe delimited files use the only converter to get gpx files: http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/tools/gnistogpx.php
Let me know if that online one doesn't work. I might be able to add a convert to the downloadable program so that it can give you a shapefile thats all ready to go. In this case you'll have to download each type, convert it to a gpx file, then open that with global mapper, add the mp_type column and then export it.
A quick test using airports and it appears to work great. Loaded into Global Mapper and they appear to show perfectly, with the correct icon. Next test will be to export as shp or mp and see how they appear in gpsmapedit. I expect it to work great, and I will be able to import thy types I want into my map.
Thanks for the help.