The Halliburton GeoGraphix CDF format Reader and Writer modules provide the FME with the ability to read and write WhiteStar files. This format is also known as the Cartographic Data Format (CDF) Version 1.0 used by the GeoGraphix® Exploration System (GES) mapping package.
The WhiteStar Corporation in the U.S. sells a variety of digital map data in this format, much of it targeted at the oil and gas, pipeline, natural resource, and engineering industries.
Overview
The WhiteStar format is a two dimensional format that employs a major/minor code scheme similar to that used by the USGS DLG format. It does not support user-defined attributes. The format does carry coordinate system information and supports several different projections, though normally it carries coordinates in decimal lat/long format. In some circumstances, the coordinates may be in degree, minute, second format.
The format can hold linear features, which may be closed into simple polygons. No polygons with holes can be stored directly. Point label features are also accommodated to carry annotation.
Reader Overview
WhiteStar datasets store entities as a header (type “B” record) followed by zero or more coordinates (type “C” records) and then by zero or more labels (type “D” records). The WhiteStar reader emits a single feature representing all of the coordinate information for an entity, as well as a feature for each label record in the entity.
Any coordinates to be drawn with the pen in the “up” position are discarded by the WhiteStar reader. The reader interprets the lifting of the pen only as a means to end a polyline or polygon.
FME considers a WhiteStar dataset to be a single file.
Writer Overview
The WhiteStar writer writes all features to a single WhiteStar file, specified by the Dataset parameter. Each feature will be written as a single entity in the output file, so no entities in the output file will contain both coordinate and label information.