Tom Patterson’s raster Natural Earth data has been available for a while, and it’s now been joined by the Natural Earth vector datasets, a joint project with Nathaniel Kelso and others; there’s now also a new home for both datasets at the Natural Earth website. Vector data is available at 1:10 million, 1:50 million and 1:110 million scales. Vector data features include:
- Country boundaries
- Administrative boundaries
- Populated places
- Coastlines
- Lakes and rivers
- Glaciated areas
- Bathymetry
- Latitude/longitude graticules
… and much more; see the full feature set description for details. Vector data is in standard shapefile format, geographic/WGS84 projection. The authors solicit both additions and corrections to the dataset. It’s good to have a high-quality free dataset of this type available in one place; while you can find comparable or even higher-quality data on the Web, it usually involves quite a bit of searching.
Related posts:
- Natural Earth Data In Google Earth
- Free Vector Country Borders, Administrative Boundaries, And Soon More
- Plot Gazetteer Features In A Google Maps Interface
- Entering Multiple Datasets For A Single Set Of Garmin Custom POIs
- A Free And Easy Shapefile Coordinate Converter
- LandSerf – Vector Functions
- Using The Demo Version Of Global Mapper As A Raster/Vector Data Viewer
- Importing GIS Data Into a GPS Unit
- Free Neighborhood Boundary Shapefiles
- Converting US Census TIGER Data Into Shapefiles For Free
- Two OpenStreetMap Data Tools
- Exporting GPS Data To GIS I – Garmin GPS Units
- US/Global Terrain Shading Data And Landcover Imagery
- Interactive US Census Data Viewing In Google Earth With The GE-Census Explorer
- Converting E00 Vector Data To Shapefiles – A Free And Fairly Painless Approach
I think you mean Nathaniel Kelso, not Tom Kelso.
My bad – fixed.
“while you can find comparable or even higher-quality data on the Web, it usually involves quite a bit of searching”
Could you give us please some examples (with urls)
thanks