Gentlemen: I have completed a Beta of a 1:1,000,000-scale world vector map of timezones and associated attribute data, including applicable Rule, ISO Country Codes, etc. In reviewing the tz archive postings, it became clear that some of you are working towards the same end. Therefore, I am posting the Beta to our company's FTP site in the hope that we can join forces to accelerate the development of this most useful map and data set. Background: I am a partner in MaconUSA, LLC, a digital mapping company based in Boston whose chief products are digital vector maps (with attached attribute data) of the world's political, administrative, civil, postal and telcomm boundaries. MaconUSA is the US "sister" company to Macon GmbH (Waghausel, Germany), which manufactures a suite of desktop mapping products for the European market. While we distribute primarily into the GIS market, our maps are for the most part focused on demographic, sales and marketing applications. We have developed comprehensive boundary and features sets for Europe and the US, and are in the process of completing a Mexican/Caribbean/Central American/South American Map set. We are Data Partners to virtually all of the major GIS application companies, such as ESRI, MapInfo, AutoDesk, Tactician, et al; our European maps are a (new) free inclusion in all of ESRI's shipping products. We have fielded numerous requests over the past year from our customers for both an accurate/current worldwide timezone map, and an equivalent map delineating telephone country and area code boundaries; the timezone map is the completion of part one of this development effort. While we are obviously a for-profit company, we are interested in a cooperative and public-interest effort regarding the timezone map. I would envision such cooperation including joint posting/maintenance of a timezone-map web page freely accessible to the worldwide public, participation in ongoing standards-oriented work (such as it is or may become), etc. The TZ archives maintained at elsie.nci.nih.gov appear to be as close to a defacto standards repository as a non-authoritative listserv can be; in the absence of any greater authority, we would prefer to work actively with it. Timezone Map: Three compressed files are posted at ftp://maconusa.com -- timezone.zip timezon2.zip timezone3.zip The first file (timezone.zip) contains timezone.* (the primary timezone vector map and its attached attribute database); a rough readme.txt file for overview; tz_struc.txt which describes the attribute database in detail; city_550.* (the "top" 550 cities in the world as map points with tz atributes); mid_mif.txt (which is a detailed description of MapInfo's ASCII vector map-file format that all boundary, point, and other map layers are written to, and is enough of a lingua franca to be transportable across many GIS and CAD applications). The second file (timezon2.zip) contains city_11k.* (a gazetteer of the "top" 11,000 cities in the world as map points with tz atributes); airport.* (a second gazetteer of 14,000+ airports worldwide as map points with tz attributes); ports.* (a third gazetteer of 4,500+ Ports around the world plotted as map points with tz attributes); overlay.* (a simple grid of the old 1884 GMT timezone lines for reference viewing; and ????struc.txt files detailing the file layouts for the gazetteer attribute databases. The third file (timezon3.zip) contains city_80k.* (a massive gazetteer of 80,000 cities around the world plotted as map points with associated tz attributes). All three files are password protected. The password is: proeger The files have been zipped with pkzip v. 2.04g Map Description: The map is based upon Macon's own ISO-3166 standard world map, a commercial product that is updated semi-annually. In turn, Macon's world map is based upon the original 1:1,000,000 DCW with a significant number of boundaries redrawn and/or updated to reflect current ISO-3166 definitions. The Datum is WGS1984; this particular map is current to December 31, 1996. The map was created in MapInfo, and has not yet been cleaned/processed with ArcInfo into a topological coverage (this will happen soon); the polygons are drawn in an essentially connect-the-dots sequence with preliminary shared-border snapping and de-duping. Please refer to the mid_mif.txt file for a detailed description of MapInfo's ASCII vector format. The 34 unique UTC-Offsets have been assigned colors according to a west-to-east spectral graduation using the Netscape 256-color chart (which is also Windows-compliant); these can be ignored or changed at will. The gazetteer points are derived from different sources. A significant number of just-onshore points appear slightly offshore due to being digitized from lower-scale maps and/or different datums; these have been properly attributed with tz data, but will be positionally adjusted in the final release. Nevertheless, the gazetteer collection has been included at this time because it is powerful testament to the primary advantage of defining detailed timezone polygons: a simple point-in-polygon operation can in one pass assign tz attributes to a virtually limitless number of map objects. Specific Timezone Notes: We have had to take some liberties in this beta version: 1) Asia/Timor -- A specific objective in producing this file was maintenance of strict ISO-3166 compliance; in this case, the principal requirement was simply including every country in the ISO roster. To wit, we added a new timezone, Asia/Timor, to represent East Timor. It has been assigned the (default) rule, No_DST, which matches its neighboring zone, Asia/Ujung_Pandang. 2) Atlantic/Madeira -- Even though Atlantic/Madeira is a duplicate of Europe/Lisbon, it was left as a distinct zone for cartographic purposes; linking far-flung polygons into one object can cause problems in many mapping applications when, for example, centroids are calculated, labels are auto-placed, or MBR (minimum-bounding-rectangle) calculations are involved. 3) America/Dawson_Creek -- this boundary is approximate only, due to a lack of any refining information. 4) America/Regina, America/Winnipeg -- these boundaries obey all available notes from the archives, but are simply invented using provincial sub-boundaries and meridians/parallels in the absence of any meaningful feature definitions 5) America/Scoresbysund -- this boundary is approximate only, albeit probably very close 6) America/Thule -- same as (4) above 7) Asia/Aqtau, Asia/Aqtobe, Asia/Alma-Ata -- these boundaries were created using current provincial sub-boundaries in the absence of any refining data 8) Africa/Kinshasha, Africa/Lubumbashi -- same as (7) above 9) Asia/Irkutsk, Asia/Yakutsk, Asia/Vladivostok, Asia/Magadan -- the boundaries between these zones are not well-defined; we used a CIA map from 1994 at a scale of 1:5,000,000 to approximate these 10) America/Manaus, America/Fortaleza -- we defaulted the split between these two zones as a simple east-west meridian dividing Para 11) The attached tz attribute database defaults the ending year for currently-active Rules to 1999 for now to ease the burden on application developers using the data; this is obviously quite artificial, and any suggestions for how to handle this would be appreciated 12) The default Rule for countries with no active DST assignations is "No_DST" 13) Historical Zone and Rule information is for the most part not included; only in the case of a current Zone using a current Rule with a (provided) onset-date was the start-year included; we are happy to change this based on agreed-upon suggestions, but the drawing of historical zones is well beyond our scope. Viewing the Timezone Map: We apologize for not providing the tz map in a directly-viewable format just yet. We are currently embedding the map with its associated database into an applet which I will upload in the coming weeks. Those wishing to view the map at this time have the following alternatives: a) Use MapInfo-- both the MapInfo Desktop and MapInfo Professional products can import mid-mif files directly, since it is the intermediate ASCII format for both applications b) Use ArcView, BusinessMap, ArcInfo, or ArcCAD-- all ESRI products can import mid-mif files directly c) Use Microsoft Excel Version 7 or higher, or Microsoft Office95 or higher-- these newer versions of Excel contain a feature called DataMap which can draw, color and query a MapInfo-BINARY format map directly; I will be posting the timezone map in this format in the next day or so as timezon4.zip at ftp://www.maconusa.com d) Use Any CAD Software-- I will be posting a .DXF version of the map in the next day or so as timezon5.zip at ftp://maconusa.com e) Write Your Own Viewer-- the mid-mif ASCII vector map format is quite simple, though with all of the applications out there capable of directly handling mid-mif, you're probably better off waiting for the Excel or CAD versions to post in the next day or so, or our own embedded viewer to post within the next couple of weeks. Continued Development: We are quite committed to upgrading, updating, and generally improving this map. Any specific zone comments relating to how/where the boundaries are drawn are most useful if they provide or describe (in order of preference): the actual map, or a reference to where we can find it; underlying sub-boundaries (such as administrative or statistical or poitical or postal or municipal) comprising the zone; major land or water features which delineate a boundary or part of boundary; a "legal" description (such as "follow rickety river six miles south, then east along provincial boundary..."); corrections/additions/deletions to the list of cities/towns included in a zone (you may find the gazetteer of 80,000 cities posted as noted above useful as a starter here). Comments or Questions: Please contact Chuck Ellis, at MaconUSA, 214 Lincoln Street, Suite 115, Allston, MA 02134, Tel 617-254-2295, Fax 617-254-2883, e-mail chuck_ellis@msn.com. Respects, Chuck Ellis VP, R&D MaconUSA, LLC