World Scene

World Scene is a georeferenced raster map covering the entire world. It is held in WGS 84 datum as a series of 48 seamless tiles, each of which has an image resolution of 300 dpi equating to approximately 425 meters on the ground at the equator. The map was created from Collins Bartholomew world vector data, which is held as ArcSDE feature classes on Oracle9i and continuously maintained. These feature classes were initially symbolized using ArcMap and the Maplex Label Engine before converting labels to annotation to allow final manual tidying of text in busy areas.

The biggest challenge in creating this product was dealing with the variety of fonts and accented characters needed to satisfy the mapping specification. All place-names are shown in their local form. But because <FNT> (font) tags for those accents are not part of the Latin1 character set, they had to be manually applied to ensure a globally correct representation of names. Only a few, such as Vietnamese hooks, are not supported and are shown without diacritics. By setting up annotation feature classes and ArcMap templates, changes to the source vector data can quickly be reflected in the raster product to ensure that future versions are kept up to date.

Courtesy of Collins Bartholomew, Ltd.