Map Formats

Some topographic maps are available as regular paper sheets. However many topographic products can be provided in digital formats such as:

• Scanned maps
• Digital Raster Graphics (DRG)
• GIS geodatabases

Scanned map is an exact digital representation of the paper map. The data structure of scanned maps is raster. East View Cartographic supports a variety of raster formats, including TIFF, JPEG, Adobe Photoshop and BMP.

Digital Raster Graphics (DRG) is a georeferenced (or geocoded) map; a scanned map, image or aerial photograph that is tied to a known spatial model or map projection and converted int real-world coordinates for use in GIS environment or GPS raster-based systems. Most common format for DRGs is GeoTIFF, a modification of popular TIFF format. GeoTIFF uses a small set of reserved TIFF tags to store georeferencing information. Please refer to Digital Raster Graphics Formats section for more information.

GIS geodatabases represent spatial datasets in which the location and shape of features are defined by points and straight lines (vector). For example, a road network would be described by vector data.