Danish UFO Reader/Writer

Licensing options for this format begin with FME Professional Edition.

FME provides reader and writer access to UFO files. The UFO is a published ASCII format used by the National Survey and Cadastre of Denmark.

Overview

The UFO format provides facilities for carrying a variety of metadata together with the actual feature data. Metadata can be associated with individual vertices. The UFO reader and writer provide a complete set of facilities for reading and writing this metadata; however, custom mapping files are required to populate the metadata fields. FME can perform UFO-to-UFO translations in a lossless manner.

UFO files store both feature geometry and attribution. UFO feature coordinates are always measured in centimeters.

Reader Overview

The UFO reader module produces FME features for all data held in the UFO file. The UFO reader extracts data from the file one row at a time, producing FME features from the file before passing them on to the rest of the FME for further processing. The features are produced in the order they are read from the source file. The various metadata features are emitted first, followed by the feature data. When the file is exhausted, the UFO reader terminates.

Writer Overview

The UFO writer creates and writes feature data to an UFO file specified by the Writer Dataset parameter. Existing UFO files with the same name as the specified file are overwritten with the new feature data.

The UFO writer process two kinds of features:

  • Regular features: Features such as points and lines, which are commonly seen in FME formats.
  • Meta features: Features specifically created for the UFO writer so that it can receive information for the origin for objects, label types, and the other metadata types stored in Sections 2 through 5 of the format. Note that the order in which the meta features are received by the writer is extremely important. They must be received in the order listed in the meta feature section under the Feature Representation section.