The world (map) should be free!.
With all of the open source movement going around and new
licenses like the
creative commons
you would have expected someone should be able to grab a
simple jpeg or a png of the world map for free, without any
licensing issues. Well, I’m not sure when I actually started
looking for one, but at some point in time I did, and
couldn’t actually find an appropriate map of the world
countries that’s free to download and royalty free to use in
projects. Sure some of you would say that Bing and Google
maps have their own maps and API which is great for some
purposes. but just grabbing a simple map world map with
countries borders and without any companies watermarks or
restrictions is just not available. (and if you do happen to
find one , please let me know).
So anyway I’ve decided
to play the role of a
cartographer and create my own
maps and share those with the rest of the world , for free!.
the first step was to find a reliable data set of country
borders . Took a look in the
CIA world Fact book
which was good but not enough , took also a look here in
this database which
seemed very outdated. Eventually, I’ve stumbled upon this
marvelous
Natural Earth Data website. here is the Natural Earth Data site’s description
| Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software. |
Seeing the potential of this site , I’ve made sure the data had a very unrestrictive usage policy. here are their terms
| All versions of Natural Earth raster + vector map data found on this website are in the public domain. You may use the maps in any manner, including modifying the content and design, electronic dissemination, and offset printing. The primary authors, Tom Patterson and Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, and all other contributors renounce all financial claim to the maps and invites you to use them for personal, educational, and commercial purposes. |
Perfect. now that we have the usage policy out of the way I
went ahead and starting playing with the data.
Natural
Earth exposes the data as a zip file which contains ..shp.
files.
shp
files contain very basic information about the polygons that
compose the different countries borders. here is a sample
zip file
(unzip it to find the actual shp file)
Following the
understanding how shp files are structured it was relatively
easy to read those values , construct polygons and draw
those polygons on a bit map.
The results can be shown below. To make sure the these
images are free to use , the world map images linked below
are licensed under
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
which basically means that you can do what ever you want
with these images , remix them, embed them in your projects
or even sell them on ebay , furthermore , no credits or
links are required when you use those. hope that makes it
clear enough that these images can be used for free.
If youe conscious doesn’t allow you to take something
for free without saying thanks, just put a link to to this
post and that should suffice. But again , you don’t have to.
So here are the free to use world countries maps:
A simple black and white
A greenish version
And multicolor
Just be aware that the data which these maps are based on is
take from the Natural Earth website. I just took at as is
without any modifications or corrections. if you do find any
mistakes or errors , I encourage you to read the information
in the Natural earth website in the
about page
and
corrections page
as well. send me a note as well in case the maps are
becoming outdated and when there is a need for new maps.
Hope this helps.
More Related Links
SharpMap - mapping library for use in web and desktop applications
