I'm writing a program to display the expected lifetime of our product as it relates to average weather conditions in various locations across the globe and I'd like my map to reflect the latest country borders.
Can anyone recommend somewhere to get a dataset of latitude/longitude points for the world's latest country borders?
You can get the world country borders for free from Natural Earth:
Layer Admin 0 contains the country borders
I'm aware this question is three years old, but someone might find this useful:
If a somewhat rough outline is acceptable, you may want to have a look at these KML files: https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1uL8KJV0bMb7A8-SkrIe0ko2DMtSypHX52DatEE4#rows:id=1
I only needed the Germany file, so I only tested that one, but I found it to be quite satisfying for my purpose. The border is described with about a hundred coordinates and major islands are included as well.
There is also a second set of KMLs which are even more generalised, but include more islands (again, at least for the Germany file): https://www.google.com/fusiontables/data?docid=1zn8cjdD6qlAFI7ALMEnwn89g50weLi1D-bAGSZw#rows:id=1
The most accurate dataset that I have found is from "Global Administrative Areas"
You can download files per country in your preferred format. I think it is the dataset used by Google Earth as well.
You can use Google's Geocoding service to find the bounds of any country or city area, etc, as discussed in this answer to a similar question - https://stackoverflow.com/a/31305319/243392.
