Working out the bounding box of a coutnry - web-services

Question

I'm wondering if there is a service that to get a set of lat,long points that when connected into a polygon show the outline of a country
Ideally I would like to search by country, and get back an array of lat,long coordinates. Is there such a service?

Answer 1

IF you are happy to consider not using a webservice, this data is available at varying resolutions from Natural Earth. The data is in the public domain.

Answer 2

have a closer look here;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:The_Anome/country_bounding_boxes
User:The Anome/country bounding boxes A first hack, based on all
places in the NGA GNS dataset, not (yet) properly handling latitude
wrap-round at ±180°. Country names are mapped from FIPS country codes.
This works pretty well for all countries that do not cross the 180°
meridian. Russia is a notable exception. This dataset does not include
the United States.
country longmin latmin longmax latmax
AA -70.983 12.400 -69.850 12.617
Antigua_and_ -62.417 16.817 -61.650 17.750
United_Arab_ 45.000 22.167 59.250 26.133
Afghanistan 60.433 29.150 75.033 38.484
Algeria -8.700 18.027 70.554 37.203
Azerbaijan 44.783 38.417 50.858 41.911
Albania 19.000 39.583 21.050 42.659
Armenia 43.443 38.857 46.589 41.300
Andorra 1.417 42.433 1.783 42.650
Angola 10.000 -33.806 24.350 -3.033
Argentina -73.533 -58.583 -53.367 -21.783
Australia 112.467 -55.050 168.000 -9.133
AT 122.983 -12.667 124.050 -12.000
Austria 1.200 46.373 19.000 49.017
AV -63.667 18.150 -62.917 18.600
Bahrain 45.000 25.000 50.954 26.566
Barbados -59.667 12.967 -59.383 13.333
Botswana 20.000 -28.517 29.350 24.583
BD -64.908 32.233 -64.617 32.417
Belgium 2.367 49.500 6.400 51.683
Bahamas -86.000 20.000 -70.000 29.547
Bangladesh 84.000 20.600 92.683 26.817
Belize -89.950 15.000 -75.000 18.483
Bosnia_and_H 15.746 42.558 19.671 45.268
Bolivia -69.650 -26.867 -57.550 9.678
Burma 91.833 6.000 102.000 28.350
Benin -4.000 5.000 92.219 21.322
Belarus 22.550 50.717 32.850 56.133
Solomon_Isla -130.000 -45.000 170.200 3.751 WRAPPED
Brazil -73.817 -33.733 -28.850 16.800
BS 39.700 -21.417 39.700 -21.417
Bhutan 80.000 26.217 92.717 30.000
Bulgaria 22.371 41.000 28.600 44.215
BV 3.278 -54.467 3.483 -54.386
Brunei 110.000 -2.000 120.000 15.000

Answer 3

Yahoo! GeoPlanet, the service Stack Overflow are using for their careers site seems to do bounding boxes.
Here is a blog post with detailed query examples.

Answer 4

This repo contains a set of square bounding boxes. Example below:
{
"AF": ["Afghanistan", [60.5284298033, 29.318572496, 75.1580277851, 38.4862816432]],
"AO": ["Angola", [11.6400960629, -17.9306364885, 24.0799052263, -4.43802336998]],
"AL": ["Albania", [19.3044861183, 39.624997667, 21.0200403175, 42.6882473822]],
"AE": ["United Arab Emirates", [51.5795186705, 22.4969475367, 56.3968473651, 26.055464179]],
"AR": ["Argentina", [-73.4154357571, -55.25, -53.628348965, -21.8323104794]],
"AM": ["Armenia", [43.5827458026, 38.7412014837, 46.5057198423, 41.2481285671]],
"AQ": ["Antarctica", [-180.0, -90.0, 180.0, -63.2706604895]],
"…"
}
Full set of boxes:
https://github.com/sandstrom/country-bounding-boxes