[GRASSLIST:2627] Re: Can I import these?

[Eric G. Miller]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2001 07:33:36 -0500, Ben Logan <blogan at newcreature.org> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> Some time ago, I ordered a free CD offered by the Virginia Department
> of Transportation.  It basically contains the data (or part of it)
> that the VDOT uses to generate the county maps.  The CD says "Network
> Level Basemap" and "ARC/INFO(R) Coverages" on it.
> 
> It came with software (for Windoze, of course) by ESRI called
> ArcExplorer, which allows you to view the maps, and put various pieces
> of them together.  I sure would like to be able to import them into
> GRASS, but I'm not sure exactly what format they are in.
> 
> I've included a dump of the directory structure of the CD (created
> with 'tree').  I edited the dump to make it shorter, since is was over
> 600Kb, and added a few comments marked with a hash (#).
> 
> The html docs on the CD weren't very helpful to me, but might be to
> someone who knows what they're doing. :)  If you can't tell what
> format the files are in by their extensions, I can send you the
> relevant html file(s).

Like the CD description says, it contains Arc/Info coverages.  ESRI has
never publicly released the specs. for the coverage database format.
Attempts have been made to reverse engineer it, but I'm not aware of
any attempt to write a GRASS import routine for them.  Maybe you could
bug VDOT to release the data in SDTS or Arc/Info export format -- both
of which are supported by GRASS.  Otherwise, your best bet would be
to find a friend with an Arc/Info license who could convert the data
to export (*.e00) format files.

-- 
Eric G. Miller <egm2 at jps.net>