Natural Earth

Marble currently uses the very old and outdated MWDBII dataset for vector map outlines and we really need to replace it with more up-to-date data. However, MWDBII has two key advantages, it is very compact in size enabling Marble to ship it by default, and the individual nodes have a zoom level value which speeds up drawing.

The Natural Earth data set 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." This data set seems ideal as a replacement for the MWDBII.

Advantages:

Free / Public Domain data
Regularly updated
Wide variety of political and geographic features
Available at 3 different scales: 1:10m 1:50m and 1:110m
All feature nodes at same scale are matched
Data attributes such as country code, population, relative magnitude, etc

Disadvantages:

Is in Shapefile format which is space inefficient
No per node zoom level attribute
Different scale datasets do not match so cannot efficiently be used together for zooming

The 1:10m dataset seems ideal as the base map in Marble as it provides a higher level of detail than the current MWDBII. The 1:110m dataset seems ideal for use in a country selector widget. The 1:50m dataset being less detailed than the MWDBII is probably not useful to Marble.

Using the data in the default shapefile format is not considered desirable however:

No shapefile format support in Marble (yet), would have to rely on an external library or write our own
Space inefficient (14Mb vs 2.6Mb for MWDBII)
No zoom level attribute or any node level attributes
Vector level attributes are stored in .dbf format which adds complexity to implementing shapefile support

The ideal solution would therefore be to convert the Natural Earth data into a more efficient file format that includes a zoom level attribute

As you say, there's the two approaches that could work for the lightweight default layer: a) Convert just the required NE datasets to pnt format, either merging the 3 scale levels into a single file with just 3 detail levels, or use Douglas- Peucker on the 1:10m files to create the required detail levels b) Implement an internal lightweight shapefile parser without dbf support and ship only the required NE datasets.

Some pros/cons to consider:

The 1:10m country file is 6.55MB and contains 533,202 points = 12.28 bytes/point compared to the PNT which is 745KB and contains 127,246 points = 5.85 bytes/point, which would suggest the NE data in PNT format would be half the size, so 6 MB in total. This could probably be further reduced by a light application of Douglas-Peucker.

The NE shapefiles have been carefully processed so shared borders and overlapping features like rivers match exactly and other such niceties, applying the Douglas-Peucker algorithm might affect that.

A lightweight shapefile parser would allow users/apps to load other shapefiles.

We would have to reconvert and check the data every time there's a new NE release which could be a lot of effort, but an automated shp2pnt script could prove useful to allow apps/users to display their own shapefiles in a simple way.

Overall, it seems the best approach for the updating the lightweight layer is indeed to convert the shapefiles to PNT format, provided the D-H algorithm can be deployed in a way to mark each point with a detail level rather than just throwing the points away.

For the heavier vector layer with attributes, rather than just implementing a shapefile importer based on shapelib (a C library), it might be better to implement an GDAL/OGR importer which would import any vector format and is a C++ library. That would depend on packaging weight and difficulty, so needs more investigation, but that's for another day.

Cheers!

John.

Key Natural Earth data files from v1.2, recent updates to 1.3 not included.

                           1:110m     1:50m      1:10m
                           ------     -----      -----
Admin level 0 countries     172 KB    1.36 MB     6.55 MB
Admin level 0 land borders   39 KB     301 KB      896 KB
Admin level 0 sea borders    12 KB      40 KB       79 KB
Admin level 0 disputed                  40 KB      157 KB
Admin level 1 regions        39 KB     339 MB     13.9 MB *
Admin level 1 land borders   16 KB      60 KB     4.82 MB
Coastlines                   79 KB     883 KB     2.15 MB
Rivers                       19 KB     420 KB     3.29 MB
Lakes                        10 KB     286 KB      786 MB              
Glaciers                     13 KB     208 KB     1.23 MB
Dateline                     18 KB      18 KB       18 KB
Playas                                  18 KB      106 KB
Ice Shelves                            105 KB      211 KB
Minor Islands                                      449 KB
Reefs                                              171 KB
                           -------    -------   ---------
                            417 KB    4.08 MB    34.03 MB

* level 1 regions are USA/Canada only at 110m and 50m, but whole world at 10m, 
perfect for KGeography use :-)

Other useful files:
Physical Features Land      146 KB    1.50 MB      692 KB
Physical Features Sea       348 KB     836 KB      836 MB
Populated Places                       347 KB     1.48 MB
Urban Areas                            439 KB     3.48 MB
Bathmetry                                        11.64 MB

Datasets:

Countries

– matched boundary lines and polygons with names attributes for countries and

sovereign states. Includes dependencies (French Polynesia), map units (U.S. Pacific Island Territories) and sub-national map subunits (Corsica versus mainland Metropolitan France).

Disputed areas and breakaway regions

From Kashmir to the Elemi Triangle, Northern Cyprus to Western Sahara.

First order admin (provinces, departments, states, etc.)

– internal boundaries and polygons for all but a few tiny island nations. Includes names attributes and some statistical groupings of the same for smaller countries.

Populated places

– point symbols with name attributes. Includes capitals, major cities and towns, plus significant smaller towns in sparsely inhabited regions. We favor regional significance over population census in determining rankings.

Urban polygons

– derived from 2002-2003 MODIS satellite data.

Parks and protected areas

US Only
Don't use, maybe user download layer

Pacific nation groupings

– boxes for keeping these far-flung islands tidy.

Water boundary indicators

– partial selection of key 200-mile nautical limits, plus some disputed, treaty, and median lines.

Coastline

– ocean coastline, including major islands. Coastline is matched to land and water polygons.

Land

– Land polygons including major islands

Ocean

– Ocean polygon split into contiguous pieces.

Minor Islands

– additional small ocean islands ranked to two levels of relative importance.

Reefs

– major coral reefs from WDB2.

Physical region features

– polygon and point labels of major physical features.

Rivers and Lake Centerlines

– ranked by relative importance. Includes name and line width attributes. Don’t want minor lakes? Turn on their centerlines to avoid unseemly data gaps.

Lakes

– ranked by relative importance, coordinating with river ranking. Includes name attributes.

Glaciated areas

– polygons derived from DCW, except for Antarctica derived from MOA. Includes name attributes for major polar glaciers.

Antarctic ice shelves

– derived from 2003-2004 MOA. Reflects recent ice shelf collapses.

Bathymetry

– nested polygons at 0, -200, -1,000, -2,000, -3,000, -4,000, -5,000, -6,000, -7,000, -8,000, -9,000,and -10,000 meters. Created from SRTM Plus.

Geographic lines

– Polar circles, tropical circles, equator, and International Date Line.

Graticules

– 1-, 5-, 10-, 15-, 20-, and 30-degree increments. Includes WGS84 bounding box.

tk

Using GeoPainter and GeoDataLineString ("libgeodata"):

Apply Douglas-Peuker dynamicallyin GeoDataLineString class to set Detail Level
When GeoDataLineString modified (add/del point) set dirty flag
When node accessed for drawing, Dirty flag would trigger D-P to calculate detail level and unset dirty flag
Would benefit all vector formats, e.g. kml, ppx, shp

New PNT format:

1st integer (32 bit): Latitude in arcseconds

                       highest bit indicates new polygon starts: header information has to be read from 3rd integer

2nd integer (32 bit): Longitude in arcseconds
optional 3rd integer: feature key

                       highest bit feature geometry (line or ring).

1:10 dataset in PNT2 format:

each point takes 64 bits/8 bytes
the start of polygon which takes 96 bits
roughly 533,202 x 8 bytes = 4 Mb for the country borders alone
If that's too much to ship, then ship the 1:50 dataset and download the 1:10 asap

Metadata file:

convert / filter dbf into our own format

Rather than the Geonames ID, we could just use the Natural Earth object ID, then a look-up file/table that matches the NE ID to the ISO / FIPS / whatever code (NE provides this in the metadata) and Geonames ID (which we would have to provide). This would allow look-ups via whatever code or ID is available, and we wouldn't be reliant on Geonames IDs staying constant.

So required work is: 1) Fix GeoPainter LinearRings which contain a pole not rendered correctly

  - Torsten knows, problem will fill in flat map needs to create polygon if closed and crosses dateline once only

2) Implement Douglas-Peuker reduction in GeoDataLineString

  - big investigation

3) New PNT file format definition (with a different name, MBL?)

  - existing serial format from geodata???

4) Metadata file format definition (could just be csv or xml? or sqlite?) 5) New GeoData PNT2 file loading code (convert olf data). 6) shp2mbl script to convert shp to new formats (using Perl::shp? there's shp2xxx scripts out there we could copy?), including matching to Geonames ID 7) split files into 'ship with', 'download asap', 'ghns'@

Later add simple shapefile loading to GeoData, maybe with attibute layer?

GHNS:

can it download layers as well as themes?