Seeking polygon shapefile of countries, states and islands?

Question

As often happens, the hardest part of GIS is to come up with clean shapefile with an attribute table.

I need to create a choropleth map, but all I have is this:

Domicile,Captives
New Zealand,24
Vanuatu,7
Hong Kong,3
Labuan,38
Micronesia,14
Singapore,64
British Columbia,21
Anguilla,252

As you can see, some of them are countries, some are US states and there are islands too.

The way I think of doing this is to first look for a world polygon shapefile of countries, then a shapefile of states and then look manually for what is left.

Is there a shapefile that contains everything?

Answer 1

You can use the site Global Administrative Area. There, you can find surfacic shapefile for each country. Each country is divided according to its administrative divisions (ex: provinces). You can also download a polygon for the entire world.

http://www.gadm.org

Answer 2

You can use the site free Global Data from this site. If you are looking for these countries there are some that are not here but a few may meet your needs. https://dragons8mycat.wordpress.com/gis-data-sources/

Also, ESRI just has their own open data on their website here: http://opendata.arcgis.com/

Answer 3

You could use free and open OpenStreetMap data which is licensed under Open Database License (ODbL).

Keep in mind that OpenStreetMap is a community driven project so the data might in some cases be incomplete.

Mapzen offered a service where you could download borders from every administrative unit within a country, as a GeoJSON, file but that service has been discontinued.

Answer 4

You can find it directly on IGISmap.com. It provide free shapefile of country boundary, state boundary, Administrative and polygon shapefile.