I work for a company called Canadian Forest Products or Canfor for short. One of the projects I am working on is a program that will take the information about Canfor's Forest Stweardship Plans (FSP) and the related Forest Development Units (FDUs) and translate their geospatial information into GML. This export of data is required to report out to the Ministry on Canfor's silviculture activities and maintain the province wide Spatial Database on all major licensees (Forest Companies).

Now I haven't worked with spatial data for around 4 years so I am a bit rusty. I found out that each of Canfor's operations have been responsible for their own spatial data maintenance especially when it concerns FDUs. Unlike a lot of other parts of the operation they don't even have these FDUs stored in an SDE they are still held in Shapefiles. Being that my nativ programming language is Visual Basic, VB .NET I now need to find a way to take shapefiles and translate them into a GML file so that i can add the meta data and take that entire XML file and submit it to the government FTP site where it is processed.

I am thinking I will probably use some of the new LINQ features to build up the metadata that is required in the file and then process the geospatial information. That is now the biggest hanging point for me is how do i get that shape file into a set of geometric points for the gml file.