Re: Free high-quality country and administrative boundaries

On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 01:06:13PM -0700, Brent Wood wrote:
> --- Markus Neteler <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Jul 24, 2005 at 06:00:35PM -0700, Brent Wood wrote:
> > > 
> > > > What is the best *free* data in the following categories ?
> > > > I'm listing the best thing I've found so far.
> > ...
> > > Some stuff which I'd rank as very interesting includes:
> > > 
> > > vmap0/igns world vector data ? (not sure if this is synonymous with CIA but
> > > does include roads/rail to a reasonable global coverage)
> > 
> > Hi Brent,
> > 
> > what's the URL for vmap0/igns?
> 
> Hi Marcus,
> 
> I figured I'd reply to the list as well...
> 
> Sorry, igns was a typo, I meant GNS, as at 
> http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/geonames_dd_dms_date_20050701.zip
> (a world placenames database updated monthly)

[ if interested: in GRASS 6.1 we have 'v.in.gns' for these tables
  http://grass.itc.it/grass61/manuals/html61_user/v.in.gns.html
]

> VMAP0 I got from 
> http://www.mapability.com/index1.html?http&&&www.mapability.com/info/vmap0_index.html
> (I have this also in a PostGIS database at work) 

That should be the latest VMAP0 since they point to the nima.mil (now nga.mil) site.

> > > SRTM based land elevation data
> > > STRM/ETOPO based land/sea elevation/bathymetry 
> > > 
> > > This message from the GMT archives might help
> > > http://wegener.mechanik.tu-darmstadt.de/GMT-Help/Archiv/12967.html
> > > 
> > > also see
> > > ftp://topex.uscd.edu/pub/srtm30_plus
> > 
> > Interestingly, the topex.uscd.edu domain no longer exists (today).
> > It did two days ago. A local problem?
> 
> It's gone here too, I know it was there coz I cut & pasted the URL above...
> I have this entire dataset anyway (SRTM30+). Lots of files so I set a script
> with lots of wgets to grab them all, then scribbled out another script to build
> a GMT grdfile of each tile, then merge all the grids into one global grdfile.

How much data is that? Can you make it somehow available?

> There was a bit much data to do it all in one. I'd like to know how to do this
> effectively in GRASS!!

If you describe the file structure (offlist) to me, I may be able to help.

Markus