Natural Earth v2.0.0 RC2 Data Release

Natural Earth v2.0.0 RC2 Data Release

Some nice work by Kelso’s Corner - nice data clean up and

2.0.0 release focuses on 6 major areas and is available to download as preview release candidate 2.

1. Economic geography: added global roads, railroads, ports, and airports to show how people are interconnected and routes goods move.
2. Remastered geometries: fixed topological errors at 1:10 to 1:1,000 scales in the basic coastline, ocean, land, admin-0, and admin-1 related themes. By removing self-intersections, sliver polygons, and adjusting offset polygons, Natural Earth will import into more GIS software (like PostGIS) and be easier to maintain. The coastline was also adjusted to better conform to ~1:3,000,000 satellite imagery. Because of all these changes, some raster themes were also updated.
3. New file name and field name schemas. Full adoption of ne_10m_theme_name.shp file names with `ne_` prefix to allow better import into GeoDB and PostGIS storage, lowercase field (column) names instead of MiXeD and UPPER cased names, and use of consistent `name` field (versus name1).
4. Address user submitted bug reports, ~20 since the 1.4 release.
5. Moved to Github for the backend versioned file management and coordination.
6. Adopt semantic versioning. Know, by theme, if new changes in Natural Earth affect your project.  

 See below for more information.

http://kelsocartography.com/blog/?p=4246