Map file schema or round trip conversion

[esatel]

Hi all,

I have some techniques I would like to apply to the boundary nodes/vertices of my mesh map to regularize curvature and conform to boundaries better. Ideally, the nodes would then go back into a map file. Is there a published schema for the map file? I've heard of a couple other users who are interested but none of us can find it (hint to Aquaveo). Obviously huge chunks of the file are pretty obvious, and I think I could extract and replace the topology and elevations ignoring mystery bits, but I'd like to have more confidence.

If there is such a schema, I would gladly create a python class that represents the information and add round trip parsing and writing to sms. Or maybe someone has already written something similar?

If not, is there a lossless roundtrip coversion I can do between .map and another more standardized format? I have seen references to .map -> dxf/dfg -> shapefile. I know I can also import a shape file ... so we could do what we need based on ArcGIS programming ... but I would welcome an easier way.

Thanks,

Eli

[Alan K. Zundel]

Eli,

Sorry this has taken so long to get a response. There has been some concern that opening the format of the map files could create dependency on that format and make it harder to modify. However, I will make it a priority to get some documentation of the schema.

Alan