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Friday, January 29, 2010

Shapefiles of Countries' Internal Administrative Units

When doing GIS one desire of many students and technicians is to have internal boundaries of countries (states, provinces, departments, etc). Most GIS programs come with a general countries of the world shapefile (SHP) and maybe an American states layer but that is it.

Fortunately, there is the Global Administrative Areas Database. GAAD offers great, free shapefiles down to the third layer. Check out the countries page for more detail. Files can be download in SHP, Google KMZ, RData, and ESRI geodatabase.

4 comments:

Confini amministrativi - Riigipiirid - Political borders - 国境 - 边界 said...

I arrived here just exploring. Congratulations on Your good site and best wishes from an Estonian living in Italy

Confini amministrativi - Riigipiirid - Political borders - 国境 - 边界 said...

I wanted to inform You that I added a permanent link to this website from the sidebar of my blog (Google Page Rank #3).
I am a lover of Geography indeed!
My blog has driving text in Italian and Estonian and possibility to translate into 32 languages more. However it is a collection of large photos showing political borders and checkpoints.
I'd be very glad a deep visit from You, because I'm sure You'll be finding several interesting surprises.
Best wishes and... I follow You!

Dan tdaxp said...

Wonderful!

Back when I did my thesis, this would have been crazy useful!

Very cool!

Catholicgauze said...

Neat blog! Thanks for the link.