fractal dimension project - country borders as digital data ?!

[cKleinhuis]

hello, i would love to classify countries by their fractal dimension, at least this would be the main purpose for my little fractal dimension box counting program

the problem here is, from where do i get high resolution maps of each country ?!?!?

google maps has basically it, but i am unfamillar on how to color a country with a decent color and get a high resolution file to download

vector formats would be as well perfect ...

any hints for where to get such?!?! 

[cbuchner1]

the SRTM shuttle data offers land/water masks as ESRI shape files, as far as I remember. This is vector data. It is restricted to -60 to +60 degrees latitude, so the northern European countries are not fully covered (forget about those Fjords, then...)

[cKleinhuis]

do you have a link !? i think i have to get a good book with country borders and scan them in by myself

norway - the great country of slartibartfass - needs to be in the analysis because this is best to compare it lybia-england-norway

[cbuchner1]

http://dds.cr.usgs.gov/srtm/version2_1/SWBD/

See documentation folder for details.

The data is grouped in tiles of fixed dimension in latitude/longitude (in WGS84 GPS coordinates), which will also cut larger countries into several tiles. Also it contains lakes and rivers inside the countries. If you need to analyze individual countries, this data set becomes much harder to piece back together and to analyze by country. You need to use another dataset containing the country outlines, so you will be only looking at the coast lines for one country at a time  -and be sure to ignore any borders to neighboring countries (e.g. along rivers) in order not to mess up your fractal dimension.

You probably need some reader or converter for the ESRI shapefile format, too. There are C++ libraries to read the vector data directly.