Re: country borders on 2d-world

[Ethan A M. <sf...@us...>]

On Thursday, 22 October, 2015 20:47:37 Juhász Péter wrote:
> On Thu, 2015-10-22 at 00:17 -0500, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> > 
> > Although it isn't a type of plot I'd use in my field, it would be a 
> > really nice feature given how common this type of geographical "plot" 
> > with data points is today.  A command syntax is going to be the 
> > difficult part.  Defining the maps is another issue.  What if boundaries 
> > change?  Is there some type of universally accepted data format or 
> > descriptive language for map boundaries these days?
> > 
> > Dan
> > 
> 
> Two more issues that count against including high-resolution map data
> into gnuplot itself:
> 
> - licensing
> - data size

You may be responding to a message I haven't seen yet, but...
I don't think Dan's comment implied incorporating the map data itself
into gnuplot.  The idea, I think, is that if there are standard formats
for map data we might provide support for these to make it easier to
read from external files.  Analogous to the way we handle image formats:
   plot 'foo.png' binary filetype=png

I don't know whether this would be useful or not.  The external files
might require so much pre-processing that the syntax of the final plot
command is not an issue.

	Ethan

 
> In more detail:
> 
> The first link in the OP refers to
> http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/ , where you can eventually
> download datasets for continent, lake and country boundaries in three
> different resolutions. It says that the dataset is in the public domain,
> which means that it's fine if you want to produce maps with it on your
> own, and it may be fine for inclusion into gnuplot (but IANAL).
> The highest resolution dataset that includes country borders is >5 MB
> compressed, which is comparable to the current size of gnuplot's binary
> package.
> 
> There is also GSHHG, http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/pwessel/gshhg/ , which
> is used by software packages such as GMT or IDL, however, its license is
> LGPL, which is not compatible with gnuplot's license - or is it?
> The entire package is above 100 MB which precludes its inclusion (but it
> contains lower resolution datasets that are likely smaller).
> 
> 
> > "Is there some type of universally accepted data format or descriptive
> > language for map boundaries these days?"
> 
> Universally accepted? I don't think so. 
> However, there are many competing, widely recognized formats, ESRI
> Shapefile being perhaps the most used.
> 
> 
> Peter
> 
> 
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