World Map

Description

This world database comes from a cleaned-up version of the CIA World Data Bank II data and contains approximately 2 million points representing the world coastlines and national boundaries. This makes it suitable for extracting countries, continents, etc. while still retaining lots of detail.

The ‘world2’ database is a modified version of the ‘world’ database in which the longitude ranges from 0 through 360 degrees, instead of -180 through 180. This then allows maps of the whole Pacific Ocean for example.

Usage

data(worldHiresMapEnv)

Format

The data file is merely an assignment to a character string which specifies the name of an environment variable which contains the base location of the binary files used by the map drawing functions. This environment variable (R_MAPDATA_DATA_DIR for the datasets in the mapdata package) is set at package load time.

Source

The CIA World Data Bank II is currently (mid-2003) available from http://www.evl.uic.edu/pape/data/WDB/.

References

Richard A. Becker, and Allan R. Wilks, "Maps in S", AT&T Bell Laboratories Statistics Research Report [93.2], 1993.

Richard A. Becker, and Allan R. Wilks, "Constructing a Geographical Database", AT&T Bell Laboratories Statistics Research Report [95.2], 1995.

See Also

map, world

Examples

map('worldHires', col=1:10)
map('worldHires', 'Switzerland')
title('Switzerland')

Results