GADM: Access to Global Administrative Areas in Smalltalk

Introduction

GADM is a high-resolution spatial database of the location of the world's administrative areas for use in GIS and similar software. GADM is freely available for academic and other non-commercial use. The data contained in GADM was collected from spatial databases provided by NGO, National Governments, and/or maps and list of names available on the Internet (e.g. from Wikipedia).

Administrative areas include: countries, provinces, counties, departments, etc. up to five sublevels, which cover most boundaries in the world. For each level it provides some attributes, foremost being the name and in some cases variant names. GADM can also be used to extract polygon shapes for visualization, for example to build choropleth maps for regions. The GADM package includes the raw data in CSV format, which I parsed to build a browseable GADM world tree, allowing off-line access to the GADM database in a hierarchical fashion with objects, without need to perform on-line queries for basic requests. A hierarchical tree can be used to build a toponym browser for example.

Installation

From within Pharo 3, or Pharo 4 you can use the Configuration Browser, or evaluate the following expression:

Gofer it
 smalltalkhubUser: 'hernan' project: 'GADM';
 configurationOf: 'GADM';
 loadStable.

Usage Examples

" To access to the whole World (as seen by GADM), evaluate "
GADMWorldTree root.

" Access country Lithuania "
GADMWorldTree @ 'Lithuania'.

" To acces the Part (Partido: spanish) where I am living:"
GADMWorldTree @ 'Argentina' @ 'Buenos Aires' @ 'La Plata'.

" You want to know which type of region is Los Angeles "
(GADMWorldTree @ 'United States' @ 'California' @ 'Los Angeles') typeName " 'County' "

" You wish to list all subregions in San Marino "
(GADMWorldTree @ 'San Marino') nodeNames
 " a SortedCollection('Acquaviva' 
'Borgo Maggiore' 
'Chiesanuova' 
'Domagnano' 
'Faetano' 
'Fiorentino' 
'Montegiardino' 
'San Marino' 
'Serravalle') "

Enjoy