June/July 1999   -A GIS Publication by Mentor Software, Inc.      [Newsletter Archives]    

Customer Profile:

Safe Software Inc. specializes in spatial data processing and interoperability solutions. They offer consulting in a variety of areas including data conversion, data manipulation, and data translation. A major part of their business is to provide complete solutions to clients' data moving needs -- usually these take the form of an FME® license plus some custom setup.

FME® is a powerful data importer/exporter that allows data to be moved between different data formats without data loss. Some of the GIS and database formats supported include AutoCAD, Penmetrics, MicroStation, MapInfo, ESRI (ARC/INFO, Arcview and SDE), Intergraph MGE, Vision, Oracle, and Smallworld. FME’s data processing environment enables users to perform many functions with their data including thinning, coordinate conversion, transformation and integration.  You can download a demo of FME® from http://www.safe.com/testdrv.htm.

Take the Trivia Challenge! Answers at bottom of page
1. This busy surveyor collected 900,000 measurements of elevation every day on his last job.

2. How did the term geometry, which literally translated from the Greek - meaning earth measuring, become applied to the study of triangles and such ala Euclid?

3.What is a small circle?

Your Comments Please...
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Products
Multric and Hawkeye are both AutoCAD 2000 Compliant. Attention R14 Users: Download your FREE upgrade!

New! Marinus 1.01 (formerly DLG2DWG) converts USGS DLG data to AutoCAD drawing file (i.e. .DWG) format. Marinus is capable of producing the resulting data file in any defined coordinate system, regardless of the coordinate system upon which the source data is based.

Trivia Answers:
1. During the ongoing Mars Global Surveyor mission, the MOLA instrument collects about 900,000 measurements of elevation every day. For a 3D view of Mars, go here:
http://pao.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/spacesci/pictures/mola/mars3d.htm

2. The development of geometry has its origins in ancient Egypt.  After each annual innundation of the Nile, the Egyptians had to reestablish property boundaries.   Since the annual flood erased/moved all markers, they came to rely on their limited knowledge of what we now call geometry to reestablish property boundaries. More info. on Euclid:
http://history.math.csusb.edu/Mathematicians/Euclid.html

3. A line of latitude other than the equator is actually a small circle. That is, a circle with a radius less than that of the sphere.

Want to be notified of our next freebie?

Letter from Norm
Education In The Raster World

Freebie of the Month

GeoTiffExaminer is a program which enables users to examine, and modify, the information contained in a GeoTiff file, or its World File companion.

GIS Tips
How To Convert Degrees to Meters

Ask Norm?
Question 1: Is there a way to convert usgs dlg files to .dxf format, or possibly .drg or .shp

Question 2: Wondering if a Lambert Conformal Conic "1-parallel" projection is simply a special case of the Lambert Conformal Conic "2-parallel" projection, where the two parallels are equal.

Question 3: Why does FwdInv return the second station Latitude of 34 59 45.21N from the first station Latitude of 35 00 00.00N and forward azimuth 90 00 00E, distance 49.23NM?

GIS Resources
New! Questar Productions, makers of World Construction Set. WCS is a program that lets you render GIS data as photorealistic images and animations of actual places, complete with foliage, buildings, water, clouds, haze and such. If you're interested in 3D stuff, you may also want to check out Viewscape3D.

New! The Great Globe Gallery  This site has images of various projections.

New! Locate a GIS Related Conference or event at Spatialnews.com

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