Abstract:
The American Proposed Standard for Digital
Cartographic Data presents the new national exchange format
which allows the transfer of spatial data among parties
that may use different computer hardware and different
operating system software.
A translator program for the conversion of the AutoCAD
DXf data structure to the Standard's output format has been
developed to determine the problems connected with the
writing of such a translator program.
This study was conducted to (1) present possible
solutions to the problems one encounters converting a data
structure to the national standard's output format; (2)
determine the information that is required by the standard,
but not necessarily provided by the digitizing software's
data structure, and to find a way to create it; and (3)
develop ways to manage the information in proposed digital
data bases, that contain the data sets in the standard output format, for quick use reference.
The results of this thesis are: (1) the
acknowledgement of the proposed Standard as a difficult to
understand, but powerful and versatile vehicle for data
exchange; (2) the suggestion that an index managing the
data set stored according to the new standard format should
carry information about the location, possible
restrictions, the producer, and the quality information of
these data sets; (3) the preference of a data quality
report over a data quality description for the conveyance
of the data quality information; (4) the suggestion that
any translator program should be developed with a minimally
predefined digitizing procedure, allowing the automation of
the translator program; and (5) the implementation of
layers, i.e., entity classes.
