June 2005
Intermediate to advanced
568 pages
24h 7m
English
Content preview from Mapping Hacks
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Build a Free World Gazetteer #84
Chapter 7, Names and Places
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423
HACK
download. They are in some areas inaccurate and outdated, but they are a
good start for building your own free world gazetteer.
The Data
At http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html is the GEOnet nameserver.
Here you’ll find the raw data and a web browsing interface for all the GEO-
net data. All the GEOnet datafiles are available via FTP as well as HTTP.
Grab them all using the ncftpget client, part of the ncftp package standard on
*NIX machines:
> ncftpget ftp://ftp.nga.mil/pub/gns_data/*.zip
This will download all the GNS files in ZIP format into the current direc-
tory. Zipped, the data is a little under 200 MB in size! Each file consists of a
tab-separated list of values in a common format. The format is explained in
more detail at http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/gis_countryfiles.html.
The fields we are particularly interested in are:
LAT and LONG
WGS84 latitude in decimal format
UFI
A unique feature identifier, which we’ll keep for future proofing pur-
poses
DSG
A “Feature Designation Code,” which identifies the different types of
features
FULL_NAME
The full name of the place
The GEOnet data has “Feature Classification” info for all kinds of meta-
data, including Vegetation and Undersea features, but for the most part, it
consists of information about populated places. This can be tremendously
useful for asking “Show me all ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.