Find the Projection of a Shape file

Overview

The iShare Spatial Data Warehouse (SDW) can hold data in different projections although it is better to translate all added datasets to the EPSG 27700 format (which is the projected coordinate system for the United Kingdom (UK)) for consistency and ease of use in QGIS, etc. If you have Shape files with different projections that you wish to load into your SDW this can be done by converting the data as you load it, but first you need to find its current projection.

Step-by-step guide

The first step is to find out the current EPSG of the Shape file you wish to load and this can be done using the ogrinfo command e.g. ogrinfo -al -so Shape_file_name.shp.
Open a Command window and navigate to the OGR folder e.g.

C:\Windows\system32>D:
D:\>cd Astun\Tools\OGR
D:\Astun\Tools\OGR>ogrinfo

The following is the output from running "ogrinfo -al -so ne_10m_coastline.shp"

This gives a summary of the layer's spatial information including its EPSG ID. There are often several lines that have this ID but it is the very bottom in the list that is needed i.e. 4326 in the above example.

Now see Import Layers with different Projections on how to load the file into your SDW.