Why am I starting to think something like X.500 makes more sense at this point? There's also the format used once up on a time by the UUCP mapping project - we have basically the same problem that they did. http://www.uucp.org/uumap/README They're long gone now, but there are probably still lots of tools around for processing data in this format. Come to think of it, didn't they already have something to produce a geographic map? Bob