Hi all, this seems like it must be an easy problem to solve, but I am struggling
with it. I would like to use the Digital Chart of the World data from NIMA
(National Imagery and Mapping Agency). However I am at a loss as to how to
import this data into GRASS. I downloaded the North America data from the NIMA
website, but I get a folder that has lots of subfiles, and I am not sure which
ones to work with. The data is supposed to be in VPF (some department of
defense thing) format, but I am not clear how to use it. I couldn't find
anything in the manual, book, or mailing list archives. Specifically all I want
is a map with just political boundaries of the world. Anybody worked with this
data before? I know that GISdatadepot.com has arcinfo vector data for each
country, but as there are hundreds of countries, this would be tedious to
download and also import. Thanks for any input.
I use FME, from Safe Software (http://www.safe.com/) to read VMAP/DCW, do some intermediate processing (in my case de-tiling, dissolving, and aggressive thinning). I then write it out in E00 format, and use m.in.e00 to get the data into Grass. Back in the bad old days of early Grass 5 betas I had no end of trouble producing something that Grass could read; I tried Shapefile, Generate, Mapinfo, and E00 formats, and finally settled on E00. http://www.safe.com/products/fme/formats/index.php lists the formats that FME can read/write.
You would need the Professional Edition of FME to mimic this dataflow; that version is $2000 for a Windows license. However, given your institution I think there must be a copy of it floating around somewhere. Alternatively you could probably get your conversion done using a free demo license.
You're welcome to my scripts (for FME Workbench, their graphical programming interface), but I can't offer support for them. I'm kinda swamped right now, but if the Grass cabal is interested maybe I could contribute some Grass-format versions of some of the DCW layers.
Hi all, this seems like it must be an easy problem to solve, but I am
struggling
with it. I would like to use the Digital Chart of the World data from
NIMA
(National Imagery and Mapping Agency). However I am at a loss as to how
to
import this data into GRASS. I downloaded the North America data from the
NIMA
website, but I get a folder that has lots of subfiles, and I am not sure
which
ones to work with. The data is supposed to be in VPF (some department of
defense thing) format, but I am not clear how to use it. I couldn't find
anything in the manual, book, or mailing list archives. Specifically all I
want
is a map with just political boundaries of the world. Anybody worked with
this
data before? I know that GISdatadepot.com has arcinfo vector data for
each
country, but as there are hundreds of countries, this would be tedious to
download and also import. Thanks for any input.
You can use the countries vector map from UNEP/DEWA/GRID-Geneva:
This isnt an answer, but more of a thought. You should check out http://www.sevencs.com, as they have a DNC viewer, working under linux (2.4 kernal is supported, thought web site says 2.2) and DNC's are also made by NIMA. DNC's are digital nautical charts, for mariners. I believe the US Coast Guard uses the same format. So there may be some options from them if you want to use the data you have. I'm not sure if the viewer is open source or what options it has.
Mike
ian_macmillan@umail.ucsb.edu wrote:
Hi all, this seems like it must be an easy problem to solve, but I am struggling
with it. I would like to use the Digital Chart of the World data from NIMA
(National Imagery and Mapping Agency). However I am at a loss as to how to
import this data into GRASS. I downloaded the North America data from the NIMA
website, but I get a folder that has lots of subfiles, and I am not sure which
ones to work with. The data is supposed to be in VPF (some department of
defense thing) format, but I am not clear how to use it. I couldn't find
anything in the manual, book, or mailing list archives. Specifically all I want
is a map with just political boundaries of the world. Anybody worked with this
data before? I know that GISdatadepot.com has arcinfo vector data for each
country, but as there are hundreds of countries, this would be tedious to
download and also import. Thanks for any input.
-Ian
--
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On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 10:32:54AM +0200, Moritz Lennert wrote:
Ian Macmillan said:
> Hi all, this seems like it must be an easy problem to solve, but I am
> struggling with it. I would like to use the Digital Chart of the World
> data from NIMA (National Imagery and Mapping Agency). However I am at a
> loss as to how to import this data into GRASS. I downloaded the North
> America data from the NIMA website, but I get a folder that has lots of
> subfiles, and I am not sure which ones to work with.
Recently I got the VMAP0 data converted with OGR (needs OGDI driver).
The files are SHAPE now which can be imported into GRASS.
A mapserver application is built on top of that: http://mpa.itc.it/markus/mapserver/
Untested: v.in.ogr of GRASS 5.1 should be able to read the VMAP data
directly, if OGR-lib was compiled with OGDI.
Best regards
--
Markus Neteler <neteler@itc.it> http://mpa.itc.it
ITC-irst, Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica
MPBA - Predictive Models for Biol. & Environ. Data Analysis
Via Sommarive, 18 - 38050 Povo (Trento), Italy