natural-earth-updates

natural-earth-updates Natural Earth 2.0 available for download

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 07:10:00 GMT

Hello Natural Earth subscriber, We’re proud to announce the immediate availability of Natural Earth 2.0.0! The 2.0.0 release focuses on 7 major areas and is available to download today à la carte at <a href="http://NaturalEarthData.com">http://NaturalEarthData.com</a>. <ol> <li>Economic geography: Adds global roads, railroads, ports, airports, and time zones to show how people are interconnected and goods route. </li><li>Remastered geometries: Fixes topological errors at 1:10 to 1:1,000 scales in the basic coastline, ocean, land, admin-0, and admin-1 related themes for files in the the 1:10m scaleset. By removing self-intersections, sliver polygons, and adjusting offset polygons, Natural Earth imports into more GIS software (like PostGIS) and will be easier to maintain. The coastline is adjusted to better conform to ~1:3,000,000 satellite imagery. Because of all these changes, some raster themes are also updated. Land, ocean, and minor islands all build topologically by scripting ingredients, as do the admin-0 and admin-1 cultural themes. </li><li>Introduce Gray Earth rasters: Worldwide terrain depicted monochromatically in shades of gray. It combines shaded relief and regionally adjusted hypsography that emphasizes both high mountains and the micro terrain found in lowlands. View new raster » </li><li>New file name and field name schemas: Full adoption of ne_10m_theme_name.shp file names with `ne_` prefix to allow better import into GeoDB and PostGIS storage, lowercase field (column) names instead of MiXeD and UPPER cased names, and use of consistent `name` field (versus name1). </li><li>Address user submitted bug reports: ~25 since the 1.4 release, and earlier. </li><li>Moved to Github: For the backend versioned file management and coordination. Includes scripts to package updates and auto-create derived themes. </li><li>Adopt semantic versioning: Know, by theme, the level of effort needed to update your maps when Natural Earth data updates are released. </li></ol> Other notable changes: All themes now include README and VERSION files. The admin-0 attributes have more veracity and now includes nested disputed areas (was a sidecar). Adds continent, region, subregion codes. Adds versions of country and admin-1 without boundary lakes. All places and parts of places have population and GDP estimates. The populated places pop_max and pop_min attributes are now fully built out for all records (pop max is for the metropolitan area, pop_min is for the incorporated city of the same name). populated places now include rank_max and rank_min for simple town size grading. All instances of name1 have been changed to name, name to name, name2 to name_alt. Vertexes were added to many themes to allow them to project into conics smoothly (they’re back!). All field (column) names are now generally in the order of: scalerank, featurecla, name, name_alt, natscale, labelrank, *. Contributors Many thanks to the individuals who contributed to version 2.0 over the last year of development: Tom, Nathaniel, Alex Tait, Hans van der Maarel, Scott Zillmer, Mike Migurski, Daniel Huffman, Xan Gregg, Peter Bispham, Drew Noakes, Miguel Angel Vilela, Matthew Toro, Kevin Pickell, Shawn Allen, Robert Coup, Iain, Leo, and more! Thanks also to Stamen thru the Knight Foundation Citytracking grant for sponsoring a portion of this work including remastering geometries for better PostGIS import, the move to Github, and adopting semantic versioning. Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso and Tom Patterson Prefer to read this email as a blog post? <a href="http://www.naturalearthdata.com/blog/miscellaneous/natural-earth-v2-0-0-release-notes/">http://www.naturalearthdata.com/blog/miscellaneous/natural-earth-v2-0-0-release-notes/</a>

natural-earth-updates Celebrate Natural Earth's 2 year birthday + enjoy new data (soon)

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:57:00 GMT

Hello from Natural Earth HQ! Two items in this update: <ol> <li>NATURAL EARTH TURNS 2! </li><li>NEW VERSION 1.5 DATA, soon</li></ol> Natural Earth turned 2 with the new year and we're having a belated happy hour to celebrate this Friday in San Francisco, California. Since December 2009, Natural Earth has enjoyed 1.4 million page views, 375,000 downloads, and 1,000 active watchers (including you!). The happy hour will be hosted at Stamen Design's studio. Nathaniel moved to SF last summer to do more web mapping for Stamen. Check out their work at <a href="http://www.stamen.com">http://www.stamen.com</a>. Natural Earth Happy Hour Friday, March 16th 2012 7 pm till 9:30 pm Stamen Design Studio 2017 Mission Street, Suite 300 San Francisco, CA 94110 phone: +1 (415) 558-1610 NEW DATA, soon The existing 1:10,000,000 roads for North America have been updated to show beltways and newer major roads added since the data was compiled. The alignment of the roads shown has been adjusted to fit better with the 1:250,000 North American road supplement data. Route numbers (names) have been added to the 1:10m data from the 1:250k data. Both the general and detailed 1:250k roads now have scaleRanks for throttling back compilation at each zoom level. New 1:10,000,000 roads have been added for Europe including route numbers. New 1:10,000,000 roads have been added globally, but do not yet include route numbers. Contributions welcome. New 1:10,000,000 scale AIRPORTS. New 1:10,000,000 scale PORTS. We're putting the final touches on the data now. The release will also include bug fixes to existing themes, please keep the correction requests coming. We're also working to make it easier to import the data into PostGIS. Expect version 1.5 to be available by FOSSG4 and the Where conference in April. Cheers, _Nathaniel V. KELSO @kelsosCorner kelso.it/blog <a href="mailto:nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com">nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com</a>

natural-earth-updates Natural Earth version 1.4 released

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:58:00 GMT

Hello, Read the full change list and download the data: <a href="http://kelso.it/x/ne1d4">http://kelso.it/x/ne1d4</a> Natural Earth has been downloaded more than 250,000 times and is closing in on 1 million page views since launching in the final month of 2009. Thanks! Over 65 files have changed in version 1.4 of Natural Earth. The most significant edits reflect the July 2011 independence of South Sudan. That country’s administrative level-1 units have also been refreshed, and the disputed area of Abyei is retained. Mea culpa: A major correction fixes a coding error introduced in version 1.3 that incorrectly merged Panama and Papua New Guinea into a super country in some admin-0 files. Version 1.4 reestablishes them as separate countries. Because of South Sudan, the admin-0 (sovereign, country, map units, map subunits, scale ranks, scale ranks with minor islands), boundary lines land, disputed areas and boundaries, etc. have all been updated in the 10m, 50m, 110m scale sets. 50m admin-1 states and provinces now includes a version with the lakes punched out, like the 10m has enjoyed since version 1.3. The 10m admin-1 file now includes a “scale rank” exploded version that will import into a wider range of GIS and CAD software packages that cannot import polygons over a certain vertex count. Other changes and corrections are detailed below and credited to the correction request author. No changes to the rasters in this version. Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso and Tom Patterson 19 August 2011 PS: Find something wrong with the data? Use our correction system: <a href="http://www.naturalearthdata.com/corrections/index.php?a=add">http://www.naturalearthdata.com/corrections/index.php?a=add</a>

natural-earth-updates Does your city have a nickname?

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:21:00 GMT

Dear Natural Earth fan, I’m collecting nicknames for big cities, want to help? From the Windy City (Chicago) to Hotlanta (Atlanta), LND (London) to SF (San Francisco). We should be able to type these nicknames into a place search and have the right result come back without fuss. And nicknames are fun. Results will be rolled back into Natural Earth in a future update. Know your city but still curious about somewhere else? Check out Wikipedia and report what you find. Add your cities to the Google Doc: kelso.it/x/18s Please forward to your colleagues, thanks! _Nathaniel P.S. We're just about ready to release version 1.4 of Natural Earth, updating for South Sudan and a slew of other changes.

natural-earth-updates New Cross Blended Hypso without Shaded Relief

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 17:54:00 GMT

Due to popular demand, a new version of the Cross Blended Hypsometric Tints is available without relief shading. This allows the image to be used at scales other than 1:10M. The cartographer can then mix in their own scale appropriate relief shading. The new file is available here: <a href="http://kelso.it/x/hypso">http://kelso.it/x/hypso</a> Other Natural Earth news: Tom and Nathaniel presented the project in Europe at the ICA Mountain Cartography workshop (<a href="http://kelso.it/x/10f">http://kelso.it/x/10f</a>) in Borsa, Romania and FOSS4G conference (<a href="http://kelso.it/x/10g">http://kelso.it/x/10g</a>) in Barcelona, both in October where we received a welcome reception. We plan to release roads for Europe this fall at 1:10M scale. If you would like to provide feedback on the beta version please email <a href="mailto:nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com">nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com</a>. If you have roads at that scale in other places, please also contact Nathaniel. We are still looking for more supplementary, named rivers for Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia at the 1:4M to 1:10M scale. For example, see the supplementary rivers we now offer for North America and Europe. We are also looking for national park level protected areas around the world. Would you like to see more languages included in Natural Earth besides English? Please contact <a href="mailto:nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com">nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com</a>. Would you like to see this announcement list turn into a discussion list? Thanks for your continued interest! _Nathaniel

natural-earth-updates Natural Earth version 1.2 release notes

Tue, 25 May 2010 06:08:00 GMT

Check out the blog post to download the data and see preview images of the data. <a href="http://www.naturalearthdata.com/blog/miscellaneous/natural-earth-version-1-2-release-notes/">http://www.naturalearthdata.com/blog/miscellaneous/natural-earth-version-1-2-release-notes/</a> This update introduces supplementary hydrography features in North America and Europe that quadruple (4x) the number of lakes and rivers there. Many thanks to Tom P. for generalizing the vectors and Preston M. for adding tapering to North America (absent in Europe). In some cases the basic 10m rivers and lakes were modified to fit the new information and that’s been refreshed, as well. The North America data comes from the CEC North America Environmental Atlas. The Europe data extract is kindly provided into the public domain by the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), thanks Alfred J! Check out their original, higher resolution Europe data. On the cultural front, North America gets roads and rails. General 10m detail roads and railroads come from the CEC North America Environmental Atlas. The supplementary roads are donated by XNR Productions and are at 1m scale, thanks Laura M. and Rob! If you have data or time to contribute, especially to flesh out the new transportation and hydro themes, please contact me at <a href="mailto:nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com">nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com</a>. Note: We are not committing to building out supplementary level of detail in the rest of the world (we’re not THAT crazy!), but will incorporate such data if you contribute it. As always, we edit these data files but you should too before you publish maps using them. Feed us back corrections. _Nathaniel and Tom

Natural Earth: Download Version 1.1 and Release Notes

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:08:00 GMT

Three months after our initial release, we've made 100s of changes to more than 60 files and are pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 1.1 of Natural Earth. Read all about it and download a ZIP archive with the changed files: <a href="http://www.naturalearthdata.com/blog/miscellaneous/version-1-1-release-notes/">http://www.naturalearthdata.com/blog/miscellaneous/version-1-1-release-notes/</a> The download manager for the site will be updated the next couple weeks. In the meantime, that ZIP archive has the replacement files. Thanks to over 50 contributors for making version 1.1 happen: Tom, Dick, Craig, Jill, Landon, Preston, Nancy, Alfred, Brett, Annemarie, Hans, Martin, Kristin, Gene, Laris, Donatas, Kevin, Kurt, Tom, Xan, Bill, Ed, Uffe, Jochen, Christopher, Carlos, Barry, Alex, Victor, Kimi, Steve, daan, Maxb, Matt, Eugene, Damien, mizDannasag, Zoonseovasupem, Chris, Bjørn, Prof. Ward, Michael, Roy, Daniel, Kim, Gustav, Uwe, Geoff, Kumiko, Robert, Mike, Hugo, and Leo. If you have a few hours to help, please check out the TODO listings on the release notes post linked above and email <a href="mailto:nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com">nathaniel@naturalearthdata.com</a>. Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso Tom Patterson NaturalEarthData.com