For people interested in the format of this data, 
the following is dervived from the Digital Gatekeeper Site:

The CIA World Bank II master information is a collection of records, 
specifying 5.7 million vectors, which occupies about 130
megabytes of disk space. This version of the database are represented 
as compressed binary encodings occupying a fraction of the original 
disk space. These files were produced from the original ASCII database by
Brian Reid at DEC, and updates are available at 
	ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/graphics/data/cia-wdb/
(The original ASCII files are also available from that site.)

The original CIA database is available from the U.S. Government 
and is in the public domain. (Ordering directly from the US Government
will incur a small charge for distribution.)

The orginal database heirarchy has been preserved in this incarnation
of the dataset.  There are separate directories for North America,
South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. The suffix of the file
denotes its contents:
	cil		Coastlines
	bdy		Political Boundaries
	riv		Rivers and Canals
	pby		National Political Boundaries

For the specific contents of these files, please consult the
AVS documentation for the GIS modules.







