Seamless Digital Chart of the World

An enhanced and updated global GIS basemap – Version 10.5 Update released April 2017

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The Seamless Digital Chart of the World (SDCW) is a unique, updated basemap provided in an easy-to-use, seamless GIS format. The SDCW is based on the best currently-available global vector base map, Digital Chart of the World (Vector Smart Map 0, Edition 5 from NGA).

It comes with a variety of enhancements and updates which make it more easily usable, at a broader range of scales, and with better cartographic results than the freely available Digital Chart of the World from which it largely derives.

This data product serves as a high-quality GIS basemap for cartographers and researchers.

Major features

Proprietary adaptation of the Digital Chart of the World in a seamless Esri shapefile (.shp) data format, eliminating duplicate layers and tile boundary artifacts (see Sample Maps)
Updated country and province polygons (see Sample Maps)
Layer files and project files for ArcGIS 10.1 that simplify creation of maps with attractive, readable symbology
All features appear in global-extent Esri shapefiles or file geodatabases - features customarily drawn with borders (countries, states/provinces, inland water areas, etc. are merged across DCW tiles and libraries
First-level political subdivisions (states/provinces) are periodically updated, and country polygons (not included in VMAP 0) are created from the updated subdivisions. Second-level subdivisions have been added for India, Sri Lanka, and China
Inland water areas and watercourse lines have relative-flow attributes, allowing appropriate amounts of water to be shown at different scales and for different cartographic requirements
An improved set of populated place points, ranked by population and with improved names, allows improved symbology, labeling and scale-appropriate display of place

New in Version 10.5

Topology has been created for political, coastline and ocean feature classes to clean up gaps and features which didn’t align along borders.
First level administrative areas updated to approximately mid-2014. India and Sri Lanka districts to 2011 census. This has involved changes in over 30 countries and over 300 provinces.
File geodatabase, SDCW.gdb is included. This puts a copy of almost all shape file data in a single file geodatabase.
South Sudan has been split from Sudan.
Fields for the GENC (Geopolitical Entities, Names, and Codes) 2 and 3 letter codes have been added for countries and the administrative code is included for provinces.
FIPS 10-4 (GEC) codes added for all coastlines and political boundaries. This allows the ability to create subsets (Definition Queries) of these features.
Some other minor changes and updates.

System requirements

GIS software capable of reading Esri shapefile format (.shp) and file geodatabase format.
Shapefiles have been tested in Esri's ArcGIS 10.1 – 10.5.
Projects and layers tested in ArcGIS 10.1.
Sample ArcGIS project with wizard macro has been tested in ArcGIS 10.1 and above.
Windows system to run self-extracting .exe installation files. This need not be the computer running the GIS system, but must be able to write data to a location accessible by the GIS system.

All other technical specifications can be found in the following PDF document:

SDCW documentation

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