country_centroids.txt Frank Donnelly Geographic Centroids for Countries This tab-delimited text file contains latitude and longitude coordinates in decimal degrees and degrees/minutes/seconds for the geographic center (centroids) for each nation in the world, based on WGS 84. This includes all independent countries and some dependent entities and territories. In some cases, dependent entities are combined into one administrative unit and the coordinates are provided for one feature in that unit (all of the US Minor Outlying Islands and the French Southern Antarctic Lands). Most of the data for the world was downloaded from the NGA's GNS. Since the United States and its territories are not included in this resource, data for those areas was downloaded from the USGS GNIS. I edited the data to remove fields, consolidate records, and accomodate data from both sources. The actual coordinates were not modified from their sources in any way. The FIPS_10 field is the unique identifier for this file. The USGS field provides the unique feature identifier for records from the GNIS database, while all the fields following it provide identifiers for records from the GNS database. The centroid for the United States comes from the US Census Bureau as it was not included in either of the resources, and is for the contiguous fourty-eight states. This file can be used for performing basic distance calculations or for label placement in a GIS. 2009-02-04 Dataset text/tab-separated-values http://gothos.info/resource_files/country_centroids.txt NGA GEOnet Names Server http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html USGS Geographic Names Information System http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/index.html/ US Census Bureau http://www.census.gov en world 2009-02-04 Public domain. If you use this data, you should cite the original sources and check with those sources for additional use guidelines and metadata. This file is provided "as is" and I am not responsible for any errors or omissions.