I'm writing a geography game in Java, and I'd like to have some data on the locations of the borders of countries, but all I can find is shapefiles, and I can't get latitude/longitude data out of them, or else I can only find a single coordinate for each country.
Where can I find
- a way to extract the longitude/latitude data into usable data in Java or in a text file?
- a web site with free data on country borders that can be used in a java program?
Edit:
It doesn't need to be exact; for pretty much anything except Russia, China the U.S., and Brazil, 10 coordinates is probably enough. Islands don't really matter either. I just want to know be able to calculate relatively accurately the shortest distance between two countries.