"datamining" thousands of IGC files

At 17:26 05 March 2012, Tibor wrote:
Hi,

are there any open/free tools to datamine on database of many IGC files?

There is a threat that the free airspace for gliding in Slovakia is going
to be significantly restricted. We need tools which help prepare
arguments
about airspace usage and frequency of our flights.

If I was starting from scratch I would probably try to import all the
flights into a GIS database (PostGIS) and do the data cleaning and
queries
there. Does anybody have experience with this?

Thanks for you help,
Tibor Arpas


[Not sure why the subject didn't appear on this post before]

Hi Tibor,

I have done some of this with the IGC files (about 8000 of them I recall)
from the British Gliding Association national ladder. It was published
recently in Sailplane and Gliding and I'll willingly help you in any way I
can. There are some animations to look at if you visit:

http://www.gliding.co.uk/sailplanean...ticles.htm#SG1

The same approach was used to look at all flights over FL100 to back up a
(successful) request for exemption from transponder carriage. I'll put this
on Flickr in a minute.

All this was done by brute force with PERL code, taking a day to run over
the IGC files. The visualisation was done in 3DEM which I highly recommend
for this task.

None of this is open source - though I'd be happy to open source my code if
it is any use.

Please contact me off list and I'll explain further.

Paul