The deeper I go into coordinate reference system (CRS) the more I start to question whether I am using the right one because accuracy is the name of the game when it concerns GIS data. Goggling here and there, I realized Malaysia itself uses 4 UTM Zone reference. If a map was prepared using the familiar WGS84 with the Authority ID:4326, things would be simple but what happened if the required map prepared by a third party set on finer specifications, how now? If the user who receives that map was unaware that the CRS was not really WGS84 but a combination of WGS84 and UTM zone, then, the user will never get the CRS accurately configured. Hi, Pak Abbas! Very interesting post!

This was something I've wanted to discuss with you if we get to meet up when my wife and I return to Malaysia in lae September. (My wife and I finally got a Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) visa in June! Ferrite Core Inductor Software Store. ) We will be in KL through May or so of 2013 this time. One of the things I found when I was doing the 'Township GIS' project was that the GDAL utilities *which QGIS uses for projecting and re-projecting layers) is pretty useless when dealing with the RSO projections (like the Michigan GeoRef projection used by our state government here). Hence I had to find a work-around (using uDig) for converting shapefiles from GeoRef to something that QGIS could handle.

This also implies that QGIS would not be able to correctly handle shapefiles that Jupem might make available to users in Malaysia. One of the things I want to do is to see if the uDig workaround (would work with files from Jupem (or from anybody else using RSO). There have been posts by Malaysians in the GDAL forums begging the folks there to do something about the RSO problem, as this makes QGIS (and other open source software that depends on GDAL utilities) useless for work involving RSO-projected files. I don't know if the GDAL community will be able to act on this soon, because their foremost programmer has gone to work for Google, and who knows if he will have the time to devote to the GDAL tools like he used to?