MapInfo Professional

All current commonly used versions of MapInfo Professional can open ESRI shapefiles without direct translation. However, for ease of use within MapInfo, it is recommended that users use the universal translator within MapInfo to convert the shapefile supply to MapInfo .TAB files prior to loading the data. This will be described in the procedures for loading the data.

Loading and displaying the shapefile supply

1. In MapInfo Professional, start universal translator from the ‘Tools’ menu.

Universal translator shown in the tools menu

1. Select the translate button at the top left hand side of the dialog box.

Translate button snown in the FME quick translator window

1. In the next box, the user will need to select the translation parameters required. These will include the format of the files being translated, the format to which the data is being translated and the location of the data.

In the example below, the greenspace sites and access points shapefiles from OS Open Greenspace data, in 100 x 100kms TF and TG have been selected and the MapInfo .TAB data will be stored in a separate folder from the source data to allow easier data management.

Set translation parameters

1. Once selected, click ‘OK’. The translation will then run.

FME Quick Translator dialog showing success

A message box will appear when the process is complete. The user will now have MapInfo .TAB files for the greenspace sites and access points within OS Open Greenspace data. This procedure should be repeated for any extra 100 x 100km tiles of OS Open Greenspace which are needed.

1. To load the created MapInfo .TAB files into MapInfo Professional simply click ‘File – Open’ and navigate to where the files sit. Select the file to be opened. Select ‘new mapper’ from the drop-down menu and click ‘OK’. The data will contain two sets of tables, one for Greenspace Sites and one for access points. It should be noted that MapInfo will open the data un-styled as shown in the screenshot below:

Data loaded in the main data window of MapInfo Professional

Styling the data

Data loaded into MapInfo Professional, unlike many other GI applications, is better styled at translation stage because the .TAB format used by MapInfo can retain all the styling information applied in the translation process – it does not use separate styling files to apply a style to the data. OS Open Greenspace data currently is not supplied in MapInfo .TAB format. Therefore, there is no Ordnance Survey published styling information for use in MapInfo Professional. It is, however, possible to style the data manually in MapInfo and achieve a good result.

OS Open Greenspace data tables contain all the elements of the data within two MapInfo tables, as can be seen from the layers listing.

OS Open Greenspace table layers in the layer control window

Therefore, to style an element of the OS Open Greenspace data, SQL commands will need to be used to query the original .TAB data, pick out the specific element to style and create a new .TAB file for that element. This procedure will take some time to carry out for the whole dataset. An example is provided here for guidance, but a better option would be to use a more specialised translation software application to convert and style the data in one procedure.

1. From the toolbar menu, click ‘Query – Select’

Select menu option in the Query menu

1. In the next window, the user will need to type in the parameters to query the data. In this example, we are going to set up a query to select all the playing fields from the TF Greenspace Sites table that we have loaded. Click on the ‘Assist’ button and another window appears.

Select dialog window

Expression dialog window

1. The expression above is one which will extract the playing fields from the original .TAB file. Click on ‘Verify’ to check if the expression is correct. MapInfo will allow us to save the results in a new table which we can give a name, we will call this Plyaing_Fields. Note also the Browse results box is ticked, so that once the query has been performed, we can browse the results in a table view.

Select dialog window showing SQL selection function= "Playing Field"

1. Once satisfied, click ‘OK’. Then click ‘OK’ in the next window and the query will run. The user should see something like the following:

Query result window

1. This query will now need to be saved into a new table. Select ‘File – Save Query’

Save query option on the file menu

1. In the next window give the query a name.

Save copy of Table As dialog showing TF_Playing_Fields_TAB file being saved

• We are going to call this TF_Playing_Fields.

1. Click ‘Save’ and then close the query browser window. The user may need to close the query and any other playing field table open firstly by clicking ‘File – Close’ and selecting the open query table. Then, click on ‘File-Open’ and select the new TF_Playing_Fields .TAB file just created. The user can open the table in a new mapper or add it to the one that is already open. For this example, it will be added to the one already open in MapInfo.

Open table file dialog

1. The data will now be loaded. To check to see if the table has been loaded, click on the layers button in MapInfo to display the loaded layers.

Layers view in MapInfo

1. The new table has been loaded. It will now be possible to add a style override to the playing fields table by clicking on the style override button and bringing up the following window:

Region style dialog showing fill and line styles for playing field data

1. Several style options can now be applied to the playing fields. Click ‘OK’ when finished. The style will now be applied to the data.

Stylised playing field data shown in the main data window

In this screenshot, the playing fields in grid square TF are now coloured with a green fill. As stated previously, this method is quite laborious and is not recommended for anything other than styling small areas of data. The best alternative would be to use a specialised software package to translate the data and style it during translation.

Merging multiple .TAB files

In MapInfo, it is possible to merge the elements of two .TAB files together into one new table using the ‘append’ function. This only works for data tables of the same type and will only work for two .TAB files at a time. Please note that the file into which the new data is appended will need to be saved as a new table at the end of the process. This append process should be repeated if more than two .TAB files need to be merged. This will be the case with the OS Open Greenspace product as there are two tables for each 100 x 100km grid square.

It is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to back up the original OS Open Greenspace data tables before performing any append function, as the options for carrying out this procedure in MapInfo are limited. If multiple areas are required, it would be better to merge the original shapefiles together before translating the data into .TAB format for use in MapInfo Professional.

1. To carry out the append function, select ‘Table - Append Rows to table’ from the main menu.

Append rows to table dialog

1. Select the two tables to append together. Click ‘OK’. The data from TF Greenspace Site will now be inserted into the table TG Greenspace Site. The user will need to save the table at the end if the appended data is to be retained. Click ‘File – Save table’ once the append process has completed. Once the table is saved, TG_GreenspaceSite will now contain the data for the whole area. This is verified if the new table is opened in MapInfo.

Data visualisesed with GreenspaceSite containing both sets of data in the MapInfo main window

Loading GML data

MapInfo Professional will convert OS Open Greenspace data .GML supply into un-styled MapInfo .TAB format, using the Universal Translator tool built into MapInfo Professional version 12.5 onwards.

1. Select ‘Tools – Universal Translator’ from the main menu.

Universal translator tool in the tools menu

1. In the next window, click on the ‘translate data’ button.

1. In the next window, select ‘Geography Mark-up Language’ from the list of options. Then, select the tiles which need to be translated and a destination folder for the data to be stored. Click ‘OK’ and the translation will begin. A message will appear at the end stating that the translation was successful if all the input parameters have been set correctly.

Set translation parameters

1. Once the translation has completed, the user should see something like the following:

FME quick translator dialog showing translation completed successfully

The data can now be loaded into MapInfo Professional as .TAB format in the normal way. A point to note is that the translation from .GML to .TAB can produce a single set of OS Open Greenspace tables covering the whole area, avoiding the need for appending files.

OS Open Greenspace data visualised without styling in the main data window

The data is loaded un-styled. Styling would have to be applied manually as previously described, or another specialist translation application used to apply the styling during translation of the data.