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SOSI

SOSI = Coordinated Arrangement for Standard Information

SOSI is the Norwegian standard for exchanging geographic data developed by the Norwegian Mapping Authority.

Attributes

SOSI has a cumbersome way of describing attributes. Gemini Conversion (and other Gemini programs) stores attributes as flat tables. This makes presentation and other operations easier to handle. In SOSI, objects with associated properties are stored in a tree structure.

Example

..VLENKE                  <-- main attribute name  
...VNR E V 6              <-- 3 different sub-attributes (VEGTYPE, VEGNUMMER and HOVEDPARSELL)  
...VPA 9 2154 2268        <-- 3 new different sub-attributes  
... etc...

Tip

Gemini Conversion tries to solve this by splitting these into flat tables. To enable this, you must select it under Format Setup for SOSI.

Polygons

The SOSI format does not have a separate polygon object that contains the coordinates. Instead, they have a surface that references multiple lines (and sometimes other surfaces). A surface can reference several hundred lines.

Warning

Gemini Conversion stitches these lines together into polygons. This means that when you import surfaces from SOSI, you end up with many line elements that were used to describe the surface, and which do not constitute important information in themselves.

To avoid this problem, we recommend that you use filters when importing SOSI data with many surfaces.