Last night I made another map . It tries to answer some of more perplexing and confusing facets of t

Last night I made another florida luxury car rental map . It tries to answer some of more perplexing and confusing facets of the geography surrounding the world s 9th largest florida luxury car rental 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 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 time was when I made a variation of The Great British Venn Diagram . But this is the first time (though probably florida luxury car rental 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 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 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 florida luxury car rental domain florida luxury car rental datasets from Natural Earth; the 1:10m map Admin 0 Subunits dataset and the 1:10m Populated Places dataset. This data includes shapefiles which can be converted into GeoJSON format by the GDAL ogr2ogr command line tool. I extracted the vectors for the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Islands from the Admin 0 Subunits dataset, keying on their ISO 3166-1 Alpha-3 country codes.
I then extracted the place data from the Populated Places dataset, 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 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 florida luxury car rental subunits.json florida luxury car rental 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 florida luxury car rental 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 florida luxury car rental 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 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 florida luxury car rental 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 the islands geographically anymore, simply because the term came into effect along with The British Empire, of which Ireland florida luxury car rental 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 texts, and common vocabulary despite Irish independence in the 1920s.
And so began the search for an alternative. The term Islands of the North Atlantic (or IONA) was introduced adopted quickly within political florida luxury car rental circles, but not as heartily by scientists largely because of its ambiguity in that it could also include other islands (i.e. the North Atlantic is a big place and has unclear boundaries).
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 florida luxury car rental of hundred years later, a Roman geographer, beautifully named as Pomponius Mela, christened the islands Oceani Insulae , Latin for Islands florida luxury car rental of the Ocean . But while the legal and religious profession hang on to Latin terms, geographers are less inclined.
Another beauty is The Northwest European Archipelago . Bit of a mouthful that one and the term would no doubt face the guillotine florida luxury car rental with the resulting acronym hardly a glittering addition to common vocabulary.
The etymologist in me says keep the syllables florida luxury car rental 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 florida luxury car rental small nations, promoting national identity and moving away from imperialist symbols of the past.
The term British Isles is controversial in Ireland, 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 in London florida luxury car rental discourages its use. As a result, Britain and Ireland is used as an alternative description, and Atlantic Archipelago has had limited use among a minority in academia, although florida luxury car rental British florida luxury car rental 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!
florida luxury car rental A self-professed map addict, Gary has worked in the mapping and location space for over 20 years through a combination of luck and occasional good judgement. Gary is currently freelancing as Geotechnologist in Residence for Lokku . A Fellow of the RGS , he tweets about maps, writes about them and even makes them. Where's Gary?