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aourednik / historical-basemaps

Collection of georeferenced boundaries of world countries and cultural regions for use in mapping historical data on global or continental scale
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Add the 2022 map #31

Closed ghost closed 9 months ago

ghost commented 11 months ago

I made a political vector map of the world as of the end of 2022.

Having difficulty choosing between different base maps (Natural Earth, LSIB, ArcGIS, etc.), I decided to make my own, based on OpenStreetMap data with coordinates rounded to 1 decimal place (± 11.1 km at the equator). Given the file size limitations (3 MB), I consider it a pretty good precision suitable for a large wall map of the world printed on A0 paper (at a scale of about 1:30000000), although at high zoom levels lines may look blocky.

In order to reduce the file size, it does not cover Antarctica. I can add a separate file for Antarctic claims later if necessary.

Polygons on the map represent claimed borders of countries and may overlap in cases of territorial disputes, de facto lines of control are not shown (for example, the entire territory of the Korean peninsula is listed twice: as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and as the Republic of Korea). Again, I can add polygons with de facto borders later if necessary.

In the BORDERPREC field, code 2 (moderately precise) represents countries with known territorial disputes (even over small territories that are not shown on this map), code 3 represents countries without any significant territorial disputes. I am not quite sure about the code 1 (approximate), perhaps it can be used for some ancient tribes or something like that.

I did not fill the PARTOF field because of the difficulty of assigning each country to a single "larger cultural area", especially in the modern world. Perhaps it can be used to list international organizations of which the country is a member, but that may be hard to keep track of.

aourednik commented 8 months ago

Many thanks for this contribution!

ghost commented 8 months ago

I'm glad to finally see you back. Did you have time to download the files? If not, I can reupload them. I'm sorry, I already deleted my fork. It's just that I'm never satisfied with my work, so I have a tendency to keep changing everything, delete, and start over and over again...