Downloading the data

As mentioned in the previous section, the DISTAL application will make use of four separate sets of freely-available geospatial data:

• The World Borders Dataset

• The high-resolution GSHHS shoreline database

• The GNIS Database of US place names

• The GEONet Names Server's list of non-US place names

  Note

  For more information on these sources of data, please refer to Chapter 4, Sources of Geospatial Data

To keep track of the data as we download it, create a directory named something similar to DISTAL-data. Then it's time to download the information we need.

World Borders Dataset

If you haven't already done so, download the World Borders Dataset from:

http://thematicmapping.org/downloads/world_borders.php

When you decompress the TM_WORLD_BORDERS-0.3.zip archive, you will end up with a folder containing the World Borders Dataset in shapefile format. Move this folder into your DISTAL-data directory.

GSHHS

We next need to download the GSHHS shoreline database in shapefile format. If you haven...