SAS/GIS software organizes
spatial databases into SAS data sets and SAS catalog entries. Spatial
data might be available from some vendors in the required
SAS/GIS
format. However, any spatial data that is not in this format must
be imported before it can be used with
SAS/GIS software.
SAS/GIS software
provides interactive facilities for importing spatial data from the
following formats:
uncompressed ArcInfo interchange files (E00)
produced by ArcInfo
software from Esri.
Digital Line Graph files (DLG)
from the U.S. Geological
Survey and commercial data vendors.
Drawing Interchange Files (DXF)
produced by a variety
of mapping and CAD software applications.
SAS/GRAPH map data sets
provided with SAS/GRAPH
software.
Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing
files (TIGER)
from the U.S. Census
Bureau and commercial data vendors.
MapInfo files (MIF and MID)
from MapInfo Corporation.
SAS/GIS software also
supports a generic format to accommodate other sources of spatial
data for which no explicit importing facility is provided. You can
use SAS programming statements to translate your spatial data into
the generic format. Then you can use
SAS/GIS software to complete
the process of importing it into a
SAS/GIS spatial database.
See Importing Generic Spatial Data for more information
about the generic import types.
SAS/GIS provides both
interactive and programmatic ways to import spatial data. The remainder
of this chapter explains how to import spatial data interactively
using the
GIS Spatial Data Importing window.
See Batch Importing for information
about how to import spatial data programmatically.