More ZIPScribble Maps: AT, AU, CA, CH, DE, ES, FR, HU, IT, NL, NO, SE
The family of ZIPScribble Maps is growing. This update adds maps for a dozen countries, most of them European.
The data for countries other than the US is hard to obtain, and were it not for the tremendous effort the folks at geonames.org put into collecting it, these maps would not have been possible. That data is somewhat less reliable than the US one – having said that, however, Marc (the guy behind geonames.org) has been extremely responsive and fixed several problems that became apparent when drawing the maps. Misplaced points and mismatched names become quite apparent when a line is protruding into another state or province, or far into the ocean. So these maps actually have some use, after all. The shape data for drawing country outlines was obtained from VDSTech, but there seem to be many other sources for them.
The maps linked below are available as (large) PNGs and as PDFs for printing. There are several versions for each country, depending on how useful the short names for states that were included in the data appeared. And even though postal codes are not called ZIP codes outside of the US, I will stick to the name for the nice ring it has.
Want more maps? I will keep collecting data (and I have data for a few more countries), and post new maps as sufficiently reliable and complete data becomes available. If you have data about postal codes that contains latitude/longitude information, or can somehow be linked to it, please let me know.Posted by Robert Kosara on January 7, 2007.