I needed the outlines of most countries for a simple GIS project that I’m doing. I managed to find a world simple shapes file from http://mappinghacks.com/ called TM_WORLD_BORDERS_SIMPL-0.2.zip

This was in a shapes format used by ARC GIS and the likes, but I needed it in an easy to consume manner i.e. XML

So taking it, feeding it through MapWindow GIS and a  shareware  plugin “Shape2Earth”  (a shapefile to KML converter) I received a KML file out the other side.

As it was a bit bloated, I built a console app using some hideous code turned it into a nice usable XML doc.

Here’s an example of the result showing the UK, France, etc, produced in DeepEarth:

Deciphering should be pretty easy. Here is the rundown:

A country has a name and ISO3 tag and one to many polygons.

Each polygon has one outer bound (outer island)  and zero to many inner bounds (inner islands) for where the country isn’t (as in Swaziland inside South Africa).

Easy stuff.  Here’s the zipped download:

Let me know where you use it!

There is no licence except where mappinghacks.com applies one, but I couldn’t see one there. Tell me if I’m wrong.