I need GIS data for: region's boundaries(polygon) for all countries with region name encoding in UTF-8. Please help me where can i get?
GADM database of Global Administrative Areas is one possibility. Also you may want to ask in gis.stackexchange.com to find data for GIS.
In case somebody looks for download more of cultural, physical and raster data covering the whole world - you should check out naturalearthdata.com.
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Is there maybe (although i doubt but you never know) some free (or not free) database of all areas in world (or just cities) described with geo polygons.
For example:
Soho, London : [(latitude1, longitude1), (latitude2, longitude2), (latitude3, longitude3) ... ]
I know that openstreetmap has some free stuff but I haven find anything like this.
Any information is helpful!
Thanks,
Ivan
The MapIt Global service may help. For any co-ordinate, it returns the administrative boundaries that cover it. If you have a list of cities you're interested in, you can simply query their service and get the shapes of their boundaries.
Have a look at the GeoNames web site. They have free gazetteer data sets available for world countries, including coordinates for capital cities, towns, parks, airports, business centers, etc. I know you asked for polygons but in my extensive travels across the net I haven't found anything that meets that requirement - not for free anyway.
I'm trying to develop a application that uses informations from google/bing maps, but I need the vertice data to recreate roads and I can't use images since I can't get road names and height info.
I need vertices/nodes of streets (with latitude,longitude,altitude, street name ) and no visual data.
Thanks.
Open Street Map is definitely the way to go for this - extracting vertex information from Bing/Google is both technically difficult, and a breach of the Terms of Use. OSM data is better quality in many cases and, more to the point, free to use under a CC-BY-SA licence.
You'll also probably need a spatial database in which to store the information. I've written a couple of articles about loading OSM data into SQL Server which you might find helpful. e.g.:
http://alastaira.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/loading-open-street-map-data-in-sql-server-part-ii-ways/
I need to test performance of queries based on spatial data. I decided to use sql server and geometry datatype.
Now I need to have sample data (for example maps, cities etc). Do You know any resources that I can use to then load it into my database ?
Thanks for any help
The U.S. Census Bureau makes all of their shape files available to the public. See here:
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/
Once you have picked whatever shape files you want, you can import them into SQL Server using the excellent Shape2SQL tool found here:
http://www.sharpgis.net/page/Shape2SQL.aspx
You will find many good pointers, including Ordnance survey, CloudMade and Natural Earth, among answers to to this question:
Are there any free administrative boundaries available as shapefiles?
I have a number of XY coordinates and am looking to discern which country each of these are in, who knows a good service/way of doing this?
I am working with MySQL & PHP, not that its really relevant, I am o fey with consuming web services/pages and assume there must be a web-service/page somewhere which will do this, if someone can point me in the right direction that would be awesome.
How do I take: 306458,383136 and turn it into: United Kingdom (for example.)
Appreciate your responses in advance.
What you're looking for is called reverse geocoding, and e.g. Google Maps has this functionality: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/#ReverseGeocoding
It works from a Lat/Lon coordinate, and could return even a more precise information than only a country; note that this is only an estimate - in some places, country boundaries are somewhat tangled.
If you're looking to do this offline, or if Google's/Bing's/whoever's licensing is too strict for you (e.g. you need to do a gazillion of requests per day, or need to present the result in an unorthodox format), it's possible to run your own instance of Nominatim, feed it a data extract from OpenStreetMap (under ODbL, a much more permissive license), and query that.
For example, there's a set of boundaries available at https://wambachers-osm.website/boundaries/ - just the national boundaries, so you wouldn't need to download the entire planet map.
I need to convert latitude/longitude coordinates into Easting/Northing coordinates in the Alberta 10 TM Projection.
The 10 TM projection is similar to UTM, but it is a custom projection for the province of Alberta, Canada. I think (with some effort) I could code it myself but would rather not reinvent the wheel if it's been done already.
Grab PROJ Cartographic Projections library - open source library.
Suggested parameters for 10TM:
+proj=tmerc +lon_0=-115 +k_0=0.9992 +x_0=500000 +datum=NAD27
According to this post you may need to:
change the ellps to GRS80 if your 10TM
data is referenced to the NAD83 datum
(instead of NAD27/clrk66). You may
also need to change the false northing
(y_0) to be -5000000 if your 10TM
coordinates for Alberta are less than
5,000,000 (an AltaLIS "standard").
I should mention that proj.4 is the library to get for any kind of geographic coordinate system transformation. There's pretty much no transformation it can't do.
I also recommend reading Map Projections-A Working Manual (Paperback) by John Snyder if you are into these kinds of things.. it's a classic. :) (fixed the link)
I've used GDAL (http://www.gdal.org) to do this. It supports bindings for many different languages as well.
For free GIS libraries, take a look here: http://www.freegis.org/database/?cat=12. Hopefully you can find something that fits your needs.
I would seriously consider using a third party dll to do this rather than code it yourself.
I don't know the full details of the 10 TM projection, but I worked on a project that required coordinate conversions between many different coordinate systems to a high degree of accuracy, including UTM and Lat/Long. We found that the maths involved was way too complicated.
Perhaps take a look at the open source PROJ.4:
http://trac.osgeo.org/proj/
They seems to support a huge range of conversions, and so I hope Alberta 10 TM will be covered.
Download the opensource GIS application MapWindow
Open the GIS Tools menu
And use their shapefile reprojection tool. Under "National Grids Canada" you can select this Alberta projection.
-Jeff Tiemann
jefftiemann#gmail.com
You can also use http://code.google.com/p/android-openmap-framework/ which can convert an Android Location to a LatLonPoint, UTMPoint, or MGRSPoint.
You can insert your coordinates pairs to Coordinate System Transformation - online service where you can set appropriate input and desired output coordinate system. There are hundreds of coordinate systems - it is possible to simply find appropriate coordinate system using any keyword. You can see editable proj4 text definition for each coordinate system so if you need to modify any projection parametr, you can do it there. Or you can define your own custom projection...