How to get border data?

General talk
1

Hi,

what’s the best way to obtain data of borders? Actually, I need the border of India as a lat/lon vertex array / ordered value pairs and instead of the coastline, I need the sea border.
Roughly, how accurate are these data (e.g. in terms of deviation in meters)?

Many thanks
fatzopilot

2

Please dont use OSM as a source for country shapefiles: there are many sites which already provide this type of data without imposing on the OSM server resources.

Normally we recommend Natural Earth. See http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/1804/is-it-easy-to-extract-the-shape-of-country-across-api.

3

Thanks for pointing that out. In fact, I was able to create what I want using the shapefiles that are used by OSM in combination with some maritime border shapefiles. These were combined using Quantum GIS and MapWindow GIS. Each program has its specialties (and flaws, though), so it took nearly a day… Anyway, now I am happy :slight_smile: