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Posted by Greg Siemon on May 6, 2004, 3:14 pm
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Would an ActiveX control help
http://cmensys.com/dtr/world2.gif
Download:
http://cmensys.com/dtr/world.zip
Greg
> Hi. I'd like to get "appropriate" border information
> (longitude/latitude) in text format for the countries of the
> world (states for the US) so that I can generate multicolored
> maps.
>
> I have a small project to deliver, and the map portion
> is causing me extreme frustration. The idea is simple: show
> a map of the continents. The user clicks and gets a map of
> the countries (on that continent - no cities, no country name,
> no elevations, etc.). Click on a country, and get statistical
> information about that country (# of widgets delivered).
> An administrator will occasionally update the statistical
> information, and each country at that time is to be automatically
> recolored based on how it's faring (gray for no widgets delivered,
> yellow for the bottom 30%, etc.)
>
> So, the maps are static and there are only a fixed number of them,
> but the colors will change. To me, that means that I should
> have a (Windows/DOS) command line tool or use PHP with gd to
> recreate these maps each time there is an administrative update.
>
> So, since I haven't found such a tool, I now have have three problems:
> 1) Find ASCII longitude/latitude border data.
> 2) Whittle the data down to the relevant parts
> 3) Generate the fixed sized maps
>
> 3 is easy because I will just use something like
> http://php.net/imagefilledpolygon from PHP's gd package.
>
> 1 is a real mess for me. The best I've been able to do
> in extracting longitude/latitude data to ASCII so far is:
> http://rimmer.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/coast/getcoast.html
> And while I can do the world coastlines using the World Coast Line
> dataset at 1:5 000 000, the country information is either obsolete
> (World Vector Shoreline at 1:250 000) or broken (International
> Boundaries Only from WDB II e.g. Austria/Italy border)
>
> I installed the Win4GMT on top of GMT (whose author has supposedly
> made up do date political boundaries) and they show me a mini map to
> select a region, but but I just can't seem to get any data out of the
> program,
> and I'm not sure what to do with their accompanying files are CDF files
> (or netCDF), and I can't find in the docs.
>
> Assuming I can do 1, I still have a lot of work in 2 because I have to
> toss out irrelevant (for me) small islands, and splice together borders
> that exist as open paths into closed paths (polygons) and then eliminate
> a whole lot of points thereof.
>
> Anyway, if there would be a better way for me to go about this, I'm
> open to suggestions, but two things that won't work for me are to
> run out and get a UNIX box or to and spend thousands of dollars
> on ESRI or other software just to recover data points.
>
> Thanks,
> Csaba Gabor
>
>
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