[GRASSLIST:2894] Re: SOSI files

[Lars Forseth]

Hi!

I do not know of any conversion programs from SOSI to GRASS.

Writing one could be easy or a huge task; depending on what you want. If you 
just look at the fileformat its a simple ASCII format file with the data in 
lines, starting at the top of the file (with a header) and then a line for 
each feature or attribute. So a simple conversion program to just convert the 
features would probably not be to difficult. However if you would like to 
also convert the attributes you would have a big job ahead of you as the 
standard now is at 3.5MB as an access database.

SOSI is actualy quite a uniqe beast in Europe (at least I think it is) as its 
an operational national standard for GIS data - in Norway. It is also created 
in an "open source" fasion in that anyone can participate in the working 
groups that create the standard; about 5-6 groups now I think. And a small 
secretariat at the national mapping authority (http://www.statkart.no). 

Any of the big GIS suppliers in Norway have conversion programs or routines 
(in their software). On the aforementioned website you kan download a program 
called "sosivis" which can display "legal" (i.e syntacticaly correct) SOSI 
files. I use a conversion program created by the ESRI supplier in norway 
called "sosi2shape" (http://www.geodata.no), at my job at university of Oslo. 
It creates shapefiles from SOSI files (often several as a SOSI file can 
contain both points, lines and polygons). 

However more interesting for the spread of GRASS in Norway would be if some 
of the Norwegian users of GRASS could look at creating a conversion program. 
I know of instances where people have done this to i.e Illustrator. For all I 
know somebody could already have done so!

Regards

Lars Forseth


On Friday 11 January 2002 15:32, you wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 04:31:49PM +0100, Roger Bivand wrote:
> > On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, anne-claire serres wrote:
> > > Does anybody know what is a SOSI file ?
> >
> > I'm afraid it is a Norwegian standard vector storage format:
> > http://www.statkart.no/standard/sosi/html/welcome.htm
> >
> > SOSI GIS as search keys in Google give a number of commercial programmes
> > for converting SOSI to shape and other formats, but all on pages in
> > Norwegian.
>
> Are there any Free Software tools among them?
>
> 	There is a lot of commercial Free Software!
>
> I guess that you've meant proprietory converters.
> (There are many publications where I saw the confusion between
> commercial programms (standing for development as revenue generating
> activity and sometimes for quality) and propietory programms (not
> freedom attached, you might need to pay for licenses) Took this
> opportunity to make the point again.).

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