National Geographic Atlas Of The World Pdf Free Download

[Jacqualine Henington]

Ilove maps. My favorite activity on childhood road trips was to study the maps and find interesting cities or other place names and share them with my fellow travelers. I always prefer to be the navigator, and as long as I have a dependable map, I'm very good at it. My mom took us orienteering several times when I was young, so I learned to read a topographic map pretty well at that point, too. I've also perused more than my share of atlases. Having quality maps of the entire world, all in one volume, that are gorgeous, easy to read, and have plenty of additional information from which to learn new things is something that every family ought to have, if possible.

Flip through the pages of this impressive book and you will feel as though the world is literally at your fingertips. Full-page spreads are devoted to more than 75 political and physical maps (political maps show borders; physical maps show mountains, water, valleys, and vegetation). There are many new touches to be found in this edition, including increased usage of satellite images, an especially helpful feature when researching the most remote regions of the earth; more than 50 updated political maps that record the impact of wars, revolutions, treaties, elections, and other events; and the use of the latest research on topics such as tectonics, oceanography, climate, and natural resources. The sheer size of the atlas's index--134 pages--offers insight into just how much information is packed into 260-plus pages. The book is so physically large, in fact, that when it's open, the reader is staring at three square feet of information, a surface area larger than many television screens. The potential uses of this book for a family are vast, from settling a friendly argument to completing a school report. In the end, though, the atlas is still mostly about maps. Pages and pages of maps. Maps that force us to see how wonderful and dynamic our world is. Maps that remind us of where we've been and where we'd still like to go. --John Russell

The heart of the atlas, the maps of continents and countries, shows great cartography, the strength of NGS. As in previous editions, the Americas are first, with coverage proceeding eastward around the globe. North America is given additional coverage--22 maps for North America, 13 for Asia--since the primary readership is from the U.S and Canada. The maps are not as colorful as those in other atlases, but the number of place-names is impressive, rivaling the Times Atlas of the World (10th ed., Crown, 1999). All maps are double-page spreads, with the exception of four--Low Countries, Denmark, New Zealand, and New Guinea--that each have a single page. The binding is described as unique in that the atlas will open flat, but it is still tight, so some information will be lost if it is rebound.

An additional change from the previous edition is that the country information follows the map section rather than being included with each continent. The country facts are current, and there is a reference to the plate number for the country map. Other material includes updated geographic comparisons, for example, Mt. Everest increasing in height. Distances by air and temperature and rainfall for major cities are given in the metric system, which is not useful for many U.S. readers, although a conversion chart is provided. The index, with 140,000 entries, provides plate number and grid location with a descriptor for rivers, mountains, etc.

A Web site accompanies the atlas; its useful update section already has a printable patch for the new Great Sand Dunes National Park. Other features of the Web site are less useful, especially the flashy animations. The interactive maps will be of interest to student researchers.

World atlases never contain every town, lake, or mountain that a user may want to find. This atlas does not include my hometown of Worcester, N.Y., or Wahroonga, the suburb of Sydney, Australia, where my niece lived for a year. However, the National Geographic Atlas of the World is a major, comprehensive, current atlas that should be considered for high-school, academic, and public libraries as well as for individual purchase. It will be a mainstay of the atlas collection. Christine Bulson

Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved

The eighth edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World contains satellite views and maps of the earth's physical features—information encompassing cities, nations, and the physical and natural worlds—as well as political maps of all the countries on earth. It is also the only world atlas on the market with a fully integrated Internet component. The companion Web site to the atlas allows users to create custom views of maps, zoom into satellite globe imagery to detailed views of world landmarks, and download and print atlas updates.

The atlas is an update and expansion of the seventh edition. Updating a world atlas is a prodigious undertaking. Among other variables, countries change their boundaries, cities change their names, and highway construction changes the roads. To improve the update process, National Geographic has used digital techniques to produce the physical and political plates (i.e., two-page map spread) in the atlas since the seventh edition, when it first created the ArcInfo coverages that produced these plates.

In addition to making the more than 17,000 updates in the eighth edition, National Geographic decided to move from coverages to ArcGIS personal geodatabases for the physical and political plates. The decision to move to geodatabase format will keep National Geographic at the forefront of technology and enable it to make future updates using the most advanced techniques available.

To move from coverage to geodatabase format, National Geographic selected Esri's Professional Services Group and Esri's team member, Aerial Information Systems, Inc. (AIS). Kevin Allen, the director of Map Services at National Geographic, indicates that the selection of the Esri team was based on technical experience in creating both databases and geodatabases, past performance, and cost.

To keep the content and the appearance of the physical and political plates consistent, Esri, in cooperation with National Geographic, created a geodatabase model that accommodated the information in all the plates. David Watkins, the lead Esri cartographer, reports that the geodatabase design was necessarily created in an iterative fashion, since additional information was rolled into the geodatabase design as it was discovered. Ultimately, however, all the personal geodatabases conformed to the same database model.

To convey the updates that were necessary, National Geographic created a digital edit overlay for each plate by using Adobe Illustrator; each overlay highlighted the updates and the location of changes to features and text. In addition to converting the coverage data to personal geodatabases, Esri converted the Illustrator overlays to georeferenced TIFF files, then provided the geodatabases and the TIFF files to AIS, which edited the geodatabases with the latest version of the ArcMap application that is included in ArcGIS Desktop (ArcView, ArcEditor, ArcInfo). Primarily, ArcInfo was used for this project.

It was understood from the beginning that the ArcMap map documents would be converted into the Adobe Illustrator files with which National Geographic would publish the atlas. To streamline the ArcMap-to-Illustrator export procedure, layering in the map documents was predefined and symbology was customized to improve the work flow. For example, National Geographic provided its own Illustrator fill patterns, and the map document included these fill areas as solid fill symbols in a separate layer. This made it easy to replace the layer in the Illustrator file after the export. The same process was used for a custom color overlay and the dashed-line patterns.

After the conversion to Illustrator, National Geographic did some additional finishing, including some final text placement adjustments, adding titles, scale bars, and some of the other information associated with page layouts. Finally, Illustrator was used to create the color separations used by the printer.

Watkins says that the index, which constitutes about one-third of the atlas, represents another significant achievement. Each feature is identified in the index by name, type (e.g., river, mountain), location, page number, and reference coordinate. Although this might sound simple, implementing the entries successfully means complying with a multitude of indexing rules.

A feature that appears on several pages in the atlas, for example, is indexed only to the best page for that feature. Some features have multiple names; these features are indexed on both the preferred and secondary names. Some rivers run through several countries and have a different name in each country. These names are linked in the index by "see also" references. Watkins reports that generating the index was ultimately handled with the help of Esri's new PLTS software functionality that will be published in a future release of PLTS. The index, like the physical and political plates, was finished at National Geographic.

The Esri team completed its part of the work in less than a year (June 2003 to May 2004), and National Geographic spent several months doing the atlas finishing, given that it was solely responsible for the satellite imagery and the other plates Esri did not produce. "It's very important for people to realize that Esri did not produce this atlas," says Mary Rosenbaum, the Esri project manager. "Esri supported the work that went into part of it, but National Geographic deserves the credit for the atlas as a whole." The atlas was printed in Brazil and shipped back to the United States in time for Christmas. It has been such a big success in the marketplace that it is about to go into a second printing.

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