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Home » Data » Dataset access » How to open up Geographic Dataset for Beginners. (Downloaded GQIS, how to proceed?)
How to open up Geographic Dataset for Beginners. [message #29230] Mon, 13 May 2024 13:04 Go to next message
ev231 is currently offline  ev231
Messages: 1
Registered: May 2024
Member
Hi! I am working on a computer vision project training on households with electricity. I have inquiries on how to read the GPS Data. When we only select "Geographic Data" in the "File Data Type" section, we receive a few files of types we have never seen before (.DAT, .STX, etc). How can we read in the GPS data?
When we select both "Geographic Data" and "DHS" in the "File Data Type" section, the files mentioned above are not found. When we only download DHS data and select "Stata" type to download, we can open the .DTA file using Pandas and Python. However, if we download them with "Flat" type, we don't know how to read in the .DAT file.

Basically our end goal is to have a dataset that has a few indicators (specifically electricity) and the geographic coordinates as features (columns) and have each row a datapoint.

Would greatly appreciate guidance on how to open up these datasets!
Re: How to open up Geographic Dataset for Beginners. [message #29233 is a reply to message #29230] Mon, 13 May 2024 15:35 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Bridgette-DHS is currently offline  Bridgette-DHS
Messages: 3185
Registered: February 2013
Senior Member

Following is a response from Senior DHS Staff Member, Tom Pullum:

The DHS standard recode files are in Stata format (dta), SPSS (.sav), and SAS (.sas7bdat). Data files with the extension ".dat" are in ascii (text) format. Software exists to convert from one of these formats to another or to other formats.

Re: How to open up Geographic Dataset for Beginners. [message #29661 is a reply to message #29230] Thu, 18 July 2024 02:12 Go to previous message
marcmarcos is currently offline  marcmarcos
Messages: 4
Registered: July 2024
Member
ev231 wrote on Mon, 13 May 2024 13:04
Hi! I am working on a computer vision project training on households with electricity. I have inquiries on how to read the GPS Data. When we only select "Geographic Data" in the "File Data Type" section, we receive a few files of types we have never seen before (.DAT, .STX, etc). How can we read in the GPS data?
When we select both "Geographic Data" and "DHS" in the "File Data Type" section, the files mentioned above are not found. When we only download DHS data and select "Stata" type to download, we can open the .DTA file using Pandas and Python. However, if we download them with "Flat" type, we don't know how to read in the .DAT file.

Basically our end goal is to have a dataset that has a few indicators (specifically electricity) and the geographic coordinates as features (columns) and have each row a datapoint.

Would greatly appreciate guidance on how to open up these datasets!
Hi,

To read GPS data from .DAT and .STX files, you can use specialized tools or libraries like GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library),. For .DAT files, try using GDAL's `ogr2ogr` utility to convert them to a more accessible format like CSV or GeoJSON. You can then use Python libraries such as Pandas and Geopandas to read and manipulate the data. For integrating this with your DHS data, ensure you have common identifiers or coordinates to merge the datasets.:

Good luck with your project!
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