qgis - How to model a graveyard - one point per deceased or one per grave?

This is a continuation of my previous question about our project on how to economically get away with the implementaion of a graveyard in a GIS system…

On the graveyard we can find

• Regular graves: up to 2 people



• Family graves: more than 2, some up to 20 (sisters from a Catholic congregation…)


• War Monument: about 30 people


• Ash Scattering Area: unlimitted, starting with 100 people


• Fields with Burial Urns: up to 2 per spot


• Walls with Burial Urns: up to 3 in height

So what’s the best way to go, defining:

• each person as a POINT object


• each grave as a POINT object, the persons are part of the attributes

I would choose for each person as a POINT object:

• One simple CSV file for all the persons.


• Columns could be for example: FirstName – FamilyName – YearDeceased


• Independent of the number of persons in a grave


• That way even the ASH SCATTERING AREA can go into the file


• Eventually some code has to be written to add to the results of a search the other persons burried in the same grave

Complications I see with each grave as a POINT object:

• Each ROW needs the columns for the maximum number of persons in a grave…


• That means that a lot of cells will be empty due to just a few graves with a lot of people


• But what with the ASH SCATTERING AREA? 100 persons require all the additional columns in the table…


• It is not reasonable to have all the data in one CSV file, but having more files will highly complicate the matter.

So, comments are welcome: person or grave as POINT object? Or none of this and do I need to do it another way?

In my town, 3 years ago, they had a bureau made SHP files for them. I was handed over those files and I noticed that the graves are drawn as POLYGONS. This comes with a DBF file for the ”data of the graves”. The normal graves have 4 sets of coordinates, seems logic. But a few things seem absurd to me:

• There is an “urn wall” with hexagonal columbaria’s drawn as a set of hexagonal figures… That means that each figure has 6 sets of coordinates…



• In the “ash scattering area”, there is a pillar with little rectangular nameplates, they have drawn a rectangular POLYGON for each nameplate with 4 sets of coordinates… To me, using POLYGONS in these cases seems so much overkill in the database.

Besides that, correct me if I’m wrong, using:

• POLYGONS requires DBF files, so a DBF editor (extra costs)


• POINTS only requires CSV files, so EXCEL is enough (no extra costs)

In most towns, the data of the deceased persons come in a CSV file:

• made directly in EXCEL or



• exported form a DOS based program, made when WIN95 was still around…

Continuing to manage the “data of the persons” in one CSV file and EXCEL avoids:

• buying software that can edit DBF files


• worrying about importing the “data of persons” into the DBF file It seems not always to be without a hassle to import, edit and save data from CSV into DBF files and have NO corruption of your data. I read that this can be the case especially when working with ArcGis (ESRI).