Importing Spatial Data

Overview of Importing Spatial Data

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, but 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.
Dynamap files: from Tele Atlas N.V.
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 and then 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 on 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. For information about how to import spatial data programmatically, see Batch Importing.

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