NGA GEOnet Names Server (GNS) Reader

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) GEOnet Names Server (GNS) is a Customized Format that reads in data from the tab-delimited files provided by NGA at the following URL:

http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.html

The features in the file are given a 2D geometry and filtered according to feature classification code. Designation names and text, country names, language names, administrative names, and region names are added onto the features based on their short code values.

All the codes and their values are available on the GNS website, and were used to populate the AttributeValueMapper transformers.

There are always nine feature types written out by this datasource:

  • administrative_region
  • hydrographic
  • hypsographic
  • locality
  • populated_place
  • spot_features
  • streets
  • undersea
  • vegetation

Licensing options for this format begin with FME Desktop Professional Edition.