A self-professed map addict, Gary has worked in the mapping and location space for over 20 years thr

Last night I made another map . It tries to answer some of more perplexing and confusing facets of the geography surrounding the world s 9th largest island. I mean of course Great Britain. No, wait . I mean the United Kingdom. No, wait . I mean Britain. Or do I mean England? See, it s confusing .
This isn t the first time I ve covered this topic. The first time was for a post on the now defunct Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog entitled UK Addressing, The Non Golden Rules Of Geo Or Help! My Country spa hotel casino palm springs Doesn t Exist . The ygeoblog.com domain is now long gone and redirects to the Yahoo! corporate blog but I was able to reproduce this post here and it s also captured in the Internet Archive s WayBackMachine . The second spa hotel casino palm springs time was when I made a variation of The Great British spa hotel casino palm springs Venn Diagram . But this is the first time (though probably not the last) that I ve used a map, which is odd as this is something that s tailor-made for a map .
I d been looking spa hotel casino palm springs for a good source of geographic vector data that I could use to easily overlay polygons on a map and came across a rich source of free vector and raster map data from Natural Earth . But instead of overlaying that data on top of a standard slippy map using a JavaScript maps API to tap into a tile server s bitmap tiles, I soon wondered whether I could actually make a map from the vector data. It turned spa hotel casino palm springs out I could and decided to revisit the structure of the group of islands I live on one more time and try to visualise the difference between Great Britain, the United Kingdom and the British Isles. The end result, punningly entitled the Great British Map , looks something like this
What s missing from the map? The British Overseas Territories, which is a polite way of saying what s left of the British Empire that didn t gain independence and which the United Kingdom still asserts sovereignty over. These are Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St. Helena, Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekalia and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
The source data from the map are two public domain datasets from Natural Earth; the 1:10m map Admin 0 Subunits dataset and the 1:10m Populated Places dataset. This data includes spa hotel casino palm springs shapefiles which can be converted into GeoJSON format by the GDAL ogr2ogr command line tool. I extracted the vectors for the UK, Ireland, spa hotel casino palm springs Isle of Man and Channel Islands from the Admin 0 Subunits dataset, keying on their ISO 3166-1 Alpha-3 country codes.
spa hotel casino palm springs I then extracted the place data from the Populated Places dataset, spa hotel casino palm springs again extracting data for the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Islands, this time keying on their ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 country codes. Not entirely sure why one dataset uses Alpha-2 spa hotel casino palm springs and the other uses Alpha-3 but go figure; the data is free, accurate and open so who am I to complain?
Finally, I merged subunits.json and places.json into a single TopoJSON file, with the added bonus that TopoJSON is much much smaller than GeoJSON. The source GeoJSON weighed in at 549 KB whereas the combined TopoJSON is a mere 78 KB.
The main reason for use of TopoJSON is not that it s much more lightweight than GeoJSON, but that Mike Bostock s excellent D3 JavaScript library can easily slurp in TopoJSON and inject SVG straight into an HTML document. Which is precisely what the map s underlying code does. There s a lot more that D3 could do with this map, but it s early days and for a first step into a new maps library, I m pretty happy with how it s turned spa hotel casino palm springs out.
Speaking of code, it should come as no surprise that the map s code base is available on GitHub . The Great British Map is based on great D3 tutorial that Mike has written on vector mapping using Natural Earth , so the similarity between Mike s map and my map is entirely intentional.
Before proper analysis and comment, can I ask if Fig 3. should show Republic of Ireland in red as per your caption [i.e.sovereign state] and Fig 4. should show Northern Ireland as yellow as per your caption [i.e. administrative country]?
Worth noting that the term The British Isles is not used so much in the Republic of Ireland to describe spa hotel casino palm springs the islands geographically anymore, simply because the term came into effect along with The British Empire, of which Ireland is no longer part of. Fact is, most Irish people and organisations are uncomfortable with the fact that it is still in use in geographical spa hotel casino palm springs texts, and common vocabulary despite Irish independence in the 1920s.
And so began the search for an alternative. spa hotel casino palm springs The term Islands of the North Atlantic (or IONA) was introduced adopted quickly within political circles, but not as heartily by scientists largely because of its ambiguity in that it could also include other islands spa hotel casino palm springs (i.e. the North Atlantic is a big place and has unclear boundaries).
spa hotel casino palm springs The Western European Isles was another bandied about term, as is The Pretanic Isles a nod to the Greeks and their cartography of around 300BC. A couple of hundred years later, a Roman geographer, beautifully named as Pomponius Mela, christened the islands Oceani spa hotel casino palm springs Insulae , Latin for Islands of the Ocean . But while the legal and religious profession hang on to Latin terms, geographers are less inclined.
Another beauty spa hotel casino palm springs is The Northwest European Archipelago . Bit of a mouthful that one and the term would no doubt face the guillotine with the resulting acronym hardly a glittering addition to common vocabulary.
The etymologist in me says keep the syllables to a minimum, i.e. if people are used to saying The British Isles why not just swap British with Pretanic ? But then surely Britain would feel a bit toe-stepped by using an ancient Greek name, especially when the world is all about cherishing small nations, promoting national identity and moving away from imperialist spa hotel casino palm springs symbols of the past.
The term British Isles is controversial spa hotel casino palm springs in Ireland, spa hotel casino palm springs where there are objections to its usage due to the association of the word British with Ireland. The Government of Ireland does not recognise or use the term and its embassy spa hotel casino palm springs in London discourages its use. As a result, Britain and Ireland is used as an alternative spa hotel casino palm springs description, and Atlantic Archipelago has had limited use among a minority in academia, although British Isles is the internationally recognised term.
Things are a bit easier when it comes to nations, as you can point to ISO as the source of (political) truth, even then there s the issue of politically and culturally accepted names; such as those in Cyprus and Taiwan. And that s before you even get into contested territories.
And on the topic of Islands of the North Atlantic, one can easily see how this would be oft abbreviated to IONA, which would, of course, get the UK government miffed, hack off the people of (the island of) Iona and cause even more confusion!
A self-professed map addict, Gary has worked spa hotel casino palm springs in the mapping and location space for over 20 years through a combination of luck and occasional good judgement. As Director of Global Community Programs for HERE , Gary helps people create, edit and make maps the world over. A Fellow of the RGS , he tweets about maps, writes about them and even makes them. Where's Gary?