Merging two geo-spatial datasets in MapInfo or QGIS

Question

I have a lot of Danish adresses. Each consists of a street name, street number, the zip code, the wgs84 latitude, the wgs84 longitude, and the two etrs89 geografical codes. For each address I want to find the municipality it belonged to before the municipality reform in Denmark in 2007. I have a MapInfo file of the borders of the old municipalities. They are available for download at

http://dendigitalebyport.byhistorie.dk/kommuner/kort/1983-2007.zip

and the municipalities that I am interested in are the kommuner1983 files. My adresses are in a tab delimited .txt file. As a small example consider the following to adresses as my dataset:

Street_Name      Street_Number  Zip_code     wgs84_latitude     wgs84_longitude     etrs89_E    etrs89_N
Fiskerhusene     48             2620         55.6709437309216   12.3582957724047    711181.68   6174570.88
Astershaven      31             3210         56.0868923892299   12.1496032848558    695955.68   6220222.08

I have been told that I can do this with either MapInfo or QGIS. I have downloaded both, and I am able to open the Kommuner1983.TAB file and get a map of Denmark, but I can't open the .txt file. Can Anyone help me on how to merge the two datasets?

As I am totally new to GIS data, MapInfo, and QGIS, it's posibble that I lack data in order to do what I want to do. If this is the case, please let me know what I am missing.

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

You can create a mysql table and store the lat lng pairs in a point datatype. Then you can create a spatial index on this column and use the borders to find the lat lng pairs.