[Nathaniel]

the mapcolor attributes guide on color coding countries.

There are many other themes for download at: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/

[Nathaniel]

You should be using mapcolor_9 for this, it’s precalculated for you. There’s also a continent attribute to do the filting you describe. There is a separate ocean theme for coloring that just blue.

What application are you in?

[Nathaniel]

@rth: what column (field) attribute are you using to color the countries?

Can you attach a screen shot showing your problem?

[Nathaniel]

NASA WhirlWind on the desktop?

For iOS: http://mousebird.github.com/WhirlyGlobe/

[Nathaniel]

Yep, you got it! If you’re looking for Kaz. without the Baikonur, check out the Sovereignty areas instead (but likely just patch that single country as everything else will shift).

https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/10m-cultural-vectors/10m-admin-0-details/

[Nathaniel]

Andy, This is super awesome, thanks for putting it together and sharing here

_Nathaniel

[Nathaniel]

Try QGIS: http://qgis.org

[Nathaniel]

Stephanie,

The admin-0 counties and the admin-0 disputed areas polygons are designed to work with each other (layer the disputed areas on top of the countries at the same time).

Admin 0 – Breakaway, Disputed Areas

There are usually notes on the disputed area features saying who administers and who claims (can be multiple claims).

That said, the 2.0.0 release candidate 2 version of the disputed areas has been updated with more features:

http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=4246

And specifically: http://kelsocartography.com/downloads/gis/2012/natural_earth/ne_2.0.0_rc2/natural_earth_2.0.0_rc2_vector/ne_10m_admin_0_disputed_areas_2.0.0_rc2.zip

[Nathaniel]

For a higher resolution look at the border, please reference the US State Department’s GIS of international boundaries. Their database is more accurate to 1:250,000 scale than Natural Earth’s which is to 1:10,000,000.

https://hiu.state.gov/data/data.aspx

Department of State’s Office of the Geographer (INR/GGI) – Large Scale International Boundaries (LSIB), EURASIA- September 2012

“From the Department of State’s Office of the Geographer (INR/GGI), the LSIB is believed to be the most accurate available worldwide international boundary vector line file. The lines reflect U.S. government (USG) policy and thus not necessarily de facto control. The LSIB has no known errors in boundary location of over 4 km, and is generally accurate to within a kilometer or less. The boundary line depiction research (“recovery” of the authoritative location of the line) has been done over the past decade or so by geographers at the State Department and colleagues from other agencies, and is based on modern imagery, elevation data, relevant maps, treaties, international arbitration and court rulings, and other sources. The LSIB is frequently updated.”

[Nathaniel]

They largely follow the Google zooms you are describing, with one notable exception:

Natural Earth scale rank 4 is roughly 1:50,000,000 scale (NEW, only in Natural Earth). And then it picks back up normally with scale rank 5 is 1:36,000,000, etc.

http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=2407

Nothing is perfect, but this mostly works between all themes.

This is because while the 2^x power schema is useful, it doesn’t hold up well at that one particular scale, a typical scale used in much small and medium scale maps.

[Nathaniel]

This is up here: http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=4246

[Nathaniel]

@jkan997: The new 2.0.0 rc2 version of Natural Earth should be much easier to import into PostGIS. Let me know your experience: http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=4246

[Nathaniel]

Check out: http://kartograph.org/. It has a tool for converting SHP to SVG with attributes. You don’t have to use the other parts of that software (which are quite good, btw).

[Nathaniel]

They are calculated by humans, using roughly the technique you describe, using a mix of the mountain and other themes.

[Nathaniel]

There are many mountains that are all bunched up between Everest and K2. They are all tall. The scalerank attribute is for displaying them on a map. We want Everest and K2 to show up before Kanchenjunga so they get a “smaller” scalerank than Kanchenjunga. Natural Earth generally has scaleranks between 0 and 9, so this would be one of the last mountains added to the map as it’s zoomed in. Obviously Natural Earth is good for small scale maps of the world, so as you zoom in past the scales Natural Earth is intended for, many more smaller peaks would also be added to the map.

It could also be that Kanchenjunga should have a more important scale rank (somewhere between 2 and 9). But I wouldn’t expect it to be any smaller than 5 or 6. These scaleranks are meant to be consistent within a theme (physical elevation label points) and work well with other themes all at once. When would you expect to see this mountain added to the map as it’s zoomed in?

[Nathaniel]

Under the layer’s normal property dialog, the general tab, query builder button. Make the filter selection.

You’ll want to have 2 layers, one for drawying the shapes on the map. The other for just the labels.

[Nathaniel]

If you have one of the newer QGIS, there is a new labeling tool in the toolbar with ABC at an angle over a blue line. Click that while your target layer is selected. This labeling engine is a lot smarter than the basic one available in the layer properties label tab.

You can also download the “scale rank” version of the countries file which has some of what you’re looking for. Or just label using the 50m version of countries. You want to label based on the label rank or the scale rank.

And make sure you’re not labeling all parts of a multipart feature.

[Nathaniel]

Super cool, thanks for sharing!

[Nathaniel]

name: according to Natural Earth.

name_ascii: literally without accent marks. In the case of Duesseldorf, it should be spelled different, too. But except for some in Scandinavia that’s not done yet. See below.

ls_name: this is for matching up to the LandScan population estimate contours found elsewhere on the site. It’s a linkage ID, not anything to label with.

gn_ascii: straight from GeoNames.org. If it’s been fixed since the merge a ~20 months ago, then it’s not reflected here yet.

If there is a mistake on any of these, please file a Correction Request: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/corrections/index.php?a=add

[Nathaniel]

Because it’s a small admin-0 country, so Natural Earth doesn’t map it’s tiny admin-1 units. At this scale, they’d mostly just be blobs rather than real shapes. Try GADM instead: http://www.gadm.org/

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