[GRASSLIST:395] Re: vmap

[Hal Mueller]

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.

-- 
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Hal Mueller                hal at mobilegeographics.com
Mobile Geographics LLC     http://www.mobilegeographics.com/
Seattle, Washington        (206) 297-9575
Get MapTap for PalmOS:  http://www.mobilegeographics.com/maptap/