aviation_gis_tools: new approach

If you have followed previous posts and dig a bit into code you notice that there is a room for improvement. Because of nature of main issue - calculation of  coordinates based on various input data (reference point in different coordinate formats, bearings, magnetic variation, local Cartesian coordinate system etc.) it is obvious that well designed classes are a good choice to deal with it. We also want to track other information which I have already mention previously.
We have also started dealing with something else: parsing and extracting data from aeronautical sources. So far we are able to

• create airspace polygon from 'plain text' which can be parts of eAIP publications (see: )
• import FAA Digital Obstacle File into database
• import FAA NASR NATFIX file into database
• create files points (latitude, longitude) from files with bearings, distances etc.  in CSV format, which can also be obtained from NOTAMS, eAIP (as examples see:

And finally, we have got basic database that can be fed with data obtained from the tools described above.
Now it's time to move on and create further tools that will be useful or even indispensable if we want to deal with aviation content effectively using GIS. The process of GIS data collection is subject which might be the most time-consuming of the process of building GIS systems, especially when sources are diverse. It is worth to note, that in this case, aviation, it is hardly to predict what amount of data will have to be updated or inserted. This is because we are rather not able to predict what changes (adjusting airsapces, airways system etc.) publisher are going to make in the next cycle. To sum up it is welcome to create tools that automate some repetitive tasks.

Based on previous experience and that I am going to develop highly customized tools that works with aviation PostGIS database in near future I need to make some improvements and redesign aviation gis tools. The new library will be called aviation_gis_tools2, which will include not only  basic functionality to parse coordinates, bearings and do some calculations on ellipsoid but also functions and classes to extract and parse wide range of aeronautical in order to load it into database.

So, let's get down to business and start implementing improvements!