Trouble with POI import

[rijackson741]

I have been creating some POI categories using the POI data from here:
http://downloads.cloudmade.com/
Since they are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 License I'll post them here if I can ever get them ported properly. Porting them over to Locus is proving to be a real PITA though, although that mostly has little to do with Locus. When I eventually get all the pieces together I'll post the procedure I use for porting them too, since it's taken a lot of effort to figure it out.

Unfortunately, my latest hurdle does look like it's a Locus problem. To start at the beginning, I imported one of the gpx files taken directly from the Cloudmade site into Locus, which worked fine. It gave me over 12000 POIs though, most of which I don't care about. So then I used a couple of pieces of software to break the POIs down into smaller categories (which has been a very painful process!). Anyway, I have split out files in both gpx and kml formats. So I deleted the existing category with it's 12000+ POIs, and recreated it. Then I tried to import the attached gpx file, but it says "0 points imported". So I converted the file to kml. When I try to import the kml file the first thing it tells me is that I already have a point by that name (Gun Hill), which is strange since I deleted the entire POI category. I guess Locus has some information about the POIs held somewhere else. I told it to overwrite the point, and apply that to all points, and it imports 1726 points. But when I look in the POI category, there are only 1291 points. There really are missing valid points too. For example, if you load the kml file into Google Earth and search for "long hill, nashua", you will find a POI. But that POI is missing in Locus.

Any help or pointers about how to get past this latest problem would be much appreciated.

I am seeing some very weird behavior with guiding too, but I'll save that for later  

[rijackson741]

I forgot to mention something. After reading it in, I exported the kml file from Google Earth,  and that did not solve the problem.

[rijackson741]

I have figured out what is wrong with the kml import. Because it warned me about duplicate names I told it to overwrite, and apply that to all. Well, the kml file contains duplicate names, so it overwrote many of it's own entries! I still don't know why it gave me that warning though. I get the warning even if I delete the entire category beforehand and/or if I choose "empty selected category". As a suggestion, it would be nice to be able to filter the points not just by name, but also by location, with a used defined minimum distance. This is what GPSBabel does (which I used to create both the gpx and kml files).

I also still don't know why the gpx file does not work. Of course, that is not so important now that I have figured out how to import the kml files.

[Menion]

Hi,
  so let's fix this

when you import data, you get this "duplicate point" dialog even when points with same name are in imported file. If you want to import all points, you have to press "ignore" on all points, or disable "Duplicate points" checking in settings (which also speed up import a lot).

About importing attached GPX file - if you look into GPX file in your file, this is not a valid GPX file. This is only some file with points on single lines, but not valid GPX file!!

[rijackson741]

Hi,
  so let's fix this

when you import data, you get this "duplicate point" dialog even when points with same name are in imported file. If you want to import all points, you have to press "ignore" on all points, or disable "Duplicate points" checking in settings (which also speed up import a lot).

Yes, thanks. This is what I have now done. The only reason I chose to overwrite is because it warned me about a point with that name already existing. That seemed to happen immediately, so I assumed it was because it somehow still had knowledge of the previous POIs I installed. I realize now that it was just chance, and the message actually comes up at about point 37 (so there are points with duplicate names that happen to be very close to the start of the file).

About importing attached GPX file - if you look into GPX file in your file, this is not a valid GPX file. This is only some file with points on single lines, but not valid GPX file!!

I wouldn't know how to recognize a valid gpx file if it jumped up and bit me. It's whatever GPSBabel exports. I guess I'll stick to exporting kml  

Thanks for the help

[Menion]

valid xml is file that starts with

Code Select Expand

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<gpx

and have some XML structure at least. File you have in zip, is only ...

Code Select Expand

-72.41341,42.72647,Peak:Hogback Mountain,Peak:Hogback Mountain
-72.38674,42.73647,Peak:Curtis Hill,Peak:Curtis Hill

which is surely not valid

And about duplicate check. Locus check for duplicates in database and this means also files already imported from same file!

[rijackson741]

valid xml is file that starts with

Code Select Expand

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<gpx


I wasn't aware that gpx was an XML format. I guess now I know  

And the export problem from GPSBabel was my mistake  :oops:  GPSBabel has so many formats I got the wrong one selected. I think the gpx will work if I choose the right options.

And about duplicate check. Locus check for duplicates in database and this means also files already imported from same file!

Yes, I realize that. That might lead to a problem though. Suppose I already have some points in a category. Then I import some more. Suppose some of the new ones are genuine duplicates of those that already exist (i.e. they have the same name and location), but the new POIs also contain points with duplicate names, but in different locations. How then to filter the import?

[Menion]

Hmm, I do not check location, only names. You have to imagine that there is really a lot of possibilities how to check duplicate items. On phone, there is not too much power to test all possibilities so I choose only "name" check, that seems enough and isn't so slow.

So, how to filter import? Don't know ... if you need to have really all points, then I suggest to import all, ignore duplicates. Some points will be there twice but I think this is not a big problem ..

[rijackson741]

This is what GPSBabel offers for points:

[attachment=0:2afgyswn]Import Filters.gif[/attachment:2afgyswn]

Actually, the dialog is very confusing. The position and radius options do not refer to the duplicate location filter! They are relative to the latitude and longitude positions. I don't think any of that is necessary for the import on a phone. If this level of filtering is needed it would be better to export the POIs and filter them in GPSBabel. The duplicate location filter actually has no user settings, and will only consider a point to be a duplicate if the location is the same to 6 decimal places. IMHO, that is not very useful. What would be useful would be if I could set it so that points were considered to be the same if they were within a certain distance of each other, and had the same name. I realize that will slow down the import, but importing POIs is not something most people will do every day.