for a visualisation project I need the boundaries of the UN regions as defined here : http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49regin.htm
That's 21 polygons for the sub-regions.
I have been looking around on the usual places but couldn't find anything that also includes the oceans. The 21 polygons should cover the whole world so that any point over the world can be associated to one of the regions.
Does someone knows where I could find such file ? Or should I build it… Basically is there an official boundary in the middle of the atlantic ocean that separates the "Western Africa" region form the "South America" region ?
My assumption is that the sub-region contains more than just the countries (for example the "Caribbean" region also contains the ocean between the islands.
To clarify, I know how to identify if a point is in a polygon, that's not the point of this question. I'm looking for a shapefile (or geojson, or anything I can work with) with 21 polygons corresponding to the UN definition and covering the whole world to know if a point located somewhere in the atlantic belongs to west Africa, or to south America, or the Caribbean, etc.
Best Answer
The shapefile can be found here: http://thematicmapping.org/downloads/world_borders.php