3 replies to this topic

[jkliveng]

I am looking for a good shapefile for population density, either of the world or just japan. Or, a city file with a lot of cities/polygon for city areas that I can combine.

basically, I want this:



anyone have any tips to finding or searching? I have been messing around all morning with things and need a little help.

thanks!

[frax]

The data you are looking for is available as readily/free available raster data (think of it as an image file). There are several datasets and options, and there is also historical population density figures. The data can be converted to shape files / vector, but the result would be very big and slow to display unless you simplify it greatly.

For cities database - have you looked at the resource I posted a long while ago:
http://nordpil.com/g...f-large-cities/

[sitesatlas]

Check out the Gridded Population of the World website. The data is delivered in various raster formats as frax mentioned, so you'd need to create contours to convert it into vector shapefiles.

[frax]

either contours or vectorized polygons (the latter creates a lot of overhead, and you would need to classify the data first).

The map posted is probably using GPW.