As mentioned in the previous section, the DISTAL application will make use of four separate sets of freely-available geo-spatial data:
- The World Borders Dataset
- The high-resolution GSHHS shoreline database
- The Geonames Database of U.S. placenames
- The GEONet Names Server's list of non-U.S. placenames.
Note
For more information on these sources of data, please refer to Chapter 4,
To keep track of the data as we download it, create a directory named something like DISTAL-data. Then, it's time to download the information we need.
If you haven't already done so, download the World Borders Dataset from:
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.
We next need to download the GSHHS shoreline database in Shapefile format. If you haven't already downloaded it, the database can be found at:
Decompress the ZIP format archive and move the resulting GSHHS_shp folder (which itself contains 20 separate Shapefiles) into your DISTAL-data directory.
For the database of US placenames, go to: http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic
Click on the Download Domestic Names hyperlink, and choose the download all national features in one .zip file option. This will download a file named NationalFile_YYYYMMDD.zip, where YYYYMMDD is the datestamp identifying when the file was last updated. Once again, decompress the resulting ZIP format archive and move the NationalFile_YYYYMMDD.txt file into your DISTAL-data directory.
Finally, to download the database of non-US placenames, go to:
Click on the option to download a single compressed ZIP file that contains the entire country files dataset. This is a large download (300 MB compressed) that contains all the placename information we need worldwide. The resulting file will be named geonames_dd_dms_date_YYYYMMDD.zip, where once again YYYMMDD is the datestamp identifying when the file was last updated.
Tip
Don't get confused by names here: we go to the Geonames website to download a file named NationalFile, and to the GEOnet Names Server to download a file named geonames. From now on, we'll refer to the name of the file rather than the website it came from.
Decompress the ZIP format archive, and move the resulting geonames_dd_dms_date_YYYYMMDD.txt file into the DISTAL-data directory.