Mapping the world - Community Style.

I had an idea for a cool mashup that included a map , countries coordinates and another secret ingredient.  But to my surprise, I couldn't find a free Country to  gps coordinates Database. which means that even though Columbus discovered America more than 5 centuries ago there are still some uncharted lands in the virtual world.

Sure, there are some interesting GPS information Databases about Airports , Hotels and other special interests but I just couldn't find a very basic type of I'll give you the country name and I'll get a GPS coordinates (somewhere in the middle of the country) in return.

So I've started this wikipedia page, it is basically just a list of countries and an empty place to enter a longitude, latitude coordinates.

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How can you help you ask ? One simple way is to go to any maps services such as Google maps or Live's maps service, zoom in to a center location of your favorite country, extract the GPS coordinates of that point and paste them in the wikipedia page for all to use freely .

Here is a very short tutorial on how to extract the coordinates from Google maps , the same similar technic can be used for Live's maps service as well

3 states are already tagged with their coordinates, just 254 to go !
let's see how long it takes for the whole list to get completely filled with would countries coordinates.  

3 Comments

  • Nice project!

    Rather than creating a database of "somewhere in the middle of the country", it might be better to ask people to report the *exact* geographical centre of the country.

    I've been to this Kansas location in the U.S. which claims to be the geographical centre:

    http://www.kansastravel.org/geographicalcenter.htm

    I gather there are a couple of ways of calculating the centre as well!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_Center_of_the_Contiguous_United_States#Methods_of_Calculating_the_Geographic_Center


  • Also, this site may be of help, especially if you need the Center of the Universe:

    http://www.waymarking.com/cat/details.aspx?f=1&guid=979fa1c8-4426-4742-90ce-d68018cfd658

  • http://www.geonames.org/ - free geographical database with web services. I used this for address verification.

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