Geomapping Problems, Part 1: NASA World Wind

You all know I’m a geography-cartography nut. Perhaps I’m being sensitive, but fellow geography enthusiasts will probably share my frustration with NASA World Wind’s muddled political borders. The program’s only been around for ten months, how can it show borders that haven’t existed in years, even decades?

Iraqi-Saudi Neutral Zone still exists (partitioned in 1969):

Yemen is still divided into two countries (unified sometime in the late 1990s; date sketchy):

Belarus is part of Russia (independent since 1990):

There are plenty of other problems similar to this—Eritrea doesn’t exist, the Holy See has no borders, Hong Kong SAR still has borders. Does this mean I’m switching to Google Earth? No—they’ve got their own problems, which I’ll get to in the next post.