2 replies to this topic

[PeterBT]

I'm not a cartographer, yet I've recently taken an interest in certain aspects of cartography. I do some programming and would like to create some programs for converting Lat/Long coordinates to various projections and then manipulate the data (for instance, illustrate the real distances between two points as opposed to their perceived distance in a given projection). To do this theoretically or with one or two points is very easy, but I wish I could get a hold of a set of points for all of the major landmasses on earth (say the continents plus five or ten largest islands). I don't need cities or mountains or anything, just some coordinates (probably on the order of 10,000 points). I've looked on the net and haven't found anything. Any advice for this sort of thing?

I've started to do this by hand just plotting with a site that links to google maps and copying and pasting the values myself but at 900 data points I'm only about 3/4 of the way through continental North and South America. Is there a better way?

[frax]

There is a gazetteer database under wikipedia, could that be something? Or a database with cities, for instance?

Are you looking at creating a library for doing these calculations from scratch? Otherwise there are existing programming libraries for these tasks, open source and not - see for instance proj.4

[Nick H]

There is a gazetteer database under wikipedia, could that be something? Or a database with cities, for instance?

Are you looking at creating a library for doing these calculations from scratch? Otherwise there are existing programming libraries for these tasks, open source and not - see for instance proj.4

This might help:

http://spatialreference.org/

Regards, N.