worldHires {mapdata}

World Map

Description

This (legacy) 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.

worldLores contains exactly the same polygon information, but the boundaries have been reduced to a very low resolution.

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.

Note

This database was compiled in the 1990's and does not reflect more recent political changes. It is maintained mainly for historical purposes and legacy code. The data in maps::world on in packages like rnaturalearth is much more up to date.

Source

The CIA World Data Bank II is currently (mid-2017) still available from https://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')