[Freegis-list] EDBS/ATKIS to some useful GIS-format converter wanted!

[Markus Neteler]

Hi all,

this mail may concern to German GIS users and neighbouring
countries. The German governmental GIS data are kept
in two major formats:

 - ATKIS to store geometrical and usage information in vector format
   (land use, streets, water, forest whatever)
 - ALK to store cadastral data

Other countries have their own formats (I think it's comparing but
different to SDTS).

So - the problem: The EDBS format is public, but there is no free
converter to read it and convert to a common GIS format. However,
the governmental institutions offer simply:
 - to export DXF format: then you don't get the attribute tables (ha!)
 - to export in EDBS ("it's your problem to convert these data")

This is somewhat not satifying.

There is a ATKIS-SHAPE converter available for free download (AvATKIS),
but it doesn't convert properly. The ESR* company offers a converter as
well for some kilo-Euro.

My wish is to find someone to write an open source GPL'ed (or whatever)
EDBS-EOO or EDBS-SHAPE converter (E00 preferred as it keeps topology). Of
course these formats are proprietary, too, but they are very common.
Other suggestions are welcome.

Generally you have the vector data in several layers ("Folien").
There is a polygon section, a lines, a points and a text strings section.
These text strings are the map texts like city, street names whatever
which is printed on the map. Mostly interesting are polygons, lines
and points with their attribute tables.

The EDBS (Einheitliche Datenbank-Schnittstelle) is described
here:

 www.atkis.de
 http://www.gismngt.de/format/edbs1.htm

It is an ASCII format.

Hopefully we can find either a volunteer to program this converter (E00
write routines can be found in GRASS/v.out.e00, C-language, maybe I could
get EDBS import routines in JAVA). Or we can collect some money to
ask a company which is interested in open source computing (I already have
an idea :-), but this will be more complicated.

So far my ideas,
EDBS is really annoying, but we have to live with EDBS...

 Markus

-- 
Markus Neteler *  University of Hannover
Institute of Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology
Schneiderberg 50 * D-30167 Hannover * Germany
Tel: ++49-(0)511-762-4494  Fax: -3984