[Freegis-list] Reading VMAP data

[Oliver White]

Could anyone help with a question about data conversions?  

We have a set of VMAP data CDs (the National Imagery and Mapping Agency product),
and I'm trying to extract the roads data in some usable format, such as vertex
lists.

Is there a Free Software program which might be able to do this?  I've tried NIMA's
own (discontinued, unsupported) program NIMAUSE, and it failed to read the data, 
complaining that the data was designed for the Solaris version of the program.  Even 
if this were to work, I believe that it's only a viewer, rather than a converter.
NIMA reccommend various Non-Free tools, which is not a useful solution.

NIMA's web-page on the format seems to be unavailable, and VTerrain's notes on
the format have the warning "Don't try to read VPF unless absolutely necessary. 
It's a dog of a format". Looking at the directory structure itself shows many 
thousands of data files, most of them in some sort of binary format.

I will soon have GRASS available, although I've not used it before, and the GRASS
website doesn't list VMAP as a vector input format.  Are there any other Free or GPL tools
which can read such data?  Has anyone successfully converted or imported VMAP into
their data sets, who can say what steps are required?

Many thanks

OJW

http://www.geog.uni-hannover.de/grass/gdp/html_grass5/import.html
http://www.vterrain.org/Culture/vector.html
http://164.214.2.59/vpfproto/


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