Even though we all know that Shapefile must die, it obstinately refuses to do so, and a lot of governments still have a habit of only publishing their geospatial datasets as (ZIP archives of) shapefiles. And if you make an information request for GIS data it will probably come back to you as a shapefile...
So although users can always convert (and usually reproject) these shapefiles to GeoJSON with GDAL or QGIS, this is not very friendly to those users!
Perhaps you have already discussed this! And reasons not to do this would include:
- It requires some external dependencies, at least pyshp and shapely or gdal
- It requires thinking about coordinate reference systems (though obviously we would just reproject everything to WGS84 since that is required by GeoJSON)
- There are possible security implications (denial of service) due to the use of ZIP
But it would be a very convenient feature to have!
Even though we all know that Shapefile must die, it obstinately refuses to do so, and a lot of governments still have a habit of only publishing their geospatial datasets as (ZIP archives of) shapefiles. And if you make an information request for GIS data it will probably come back to you as a shapefile...
So although users can always convert (and usually reproject) these shapefiles to GeoJSON with GDAL or QGIS, this is not very friendly to those users!
Perhaps you have already discussed this! And reasons not to do this would include:
But it would be a very convenient feature to have!