VPF based products are intended for use as general purpose databases which can support GIS applications. Individual products provide a wide range of resolutions from high resolution to low resolution to support specific user needs. Refer to the individual product specification sheets for a more detailed description of intended use.

Some of the products covered by this general specification will be military unique, because they are intended to support the planning and execution of military operations, and will contain data that is either classified, or that will have a distribution restricted to DoD only. Others may be made available to the public. Regardless of whether or not the product has application in the commercial sector, the format (directory structures, libraries, coverages, tables, table header information, etc.) of VPF data sets must be defined for application software to access and use the data.