I was very much pleased by this product and especially the geography-region-polys.shp I found an nice solution to provide named objects in Web mapping applications.
What is unclear to me is what your future recommendations are regarding naming.
I want to refer to all kind of details like Upper Case names or not, abbreviations, use of non-Latin characters and in which language you prefer to spell the names. For example I now see ‘Atlas Saharien’ and ‘Haut Atlas’ in a country (Algeria) where also a record is stored called AHAGGAR MTS, while of course the mountains have a Berber and/or Arabic name, not French or English. Can we easily update these names according to some guidelines? How do you see evolve this nice product regarding this issue?
Thanks a lot
@Alfreddj: Thanks, glad you’re finding Natural Earth useful!
We have a general naming policy here:
Map Feature Name Guidelines
https://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/map-update-committee/
That will explain why some features are in conventional English versus local language names. Upper case is when a feature is large. This is a standard cartography convention in print.
We’re about to release a new version that includes GeoNames.org IDs on all our towns so people can make use of the multiple languages they’ve collected. The same solution might work for Physical features. For towns, we also have a display name, a parenthetical name (an alt name that the feature is well known by), and alt names. Perhaps the same would be helpful on the Physical features.
If you’d like to spearhead that work, I can set you up.
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