The IBGE makes available today (12/08/2015), on its portal on the Internet, the 2015 version of the Continuous Cartographic Base of Brazil at 1:250,000 scale - BC250 (1 cm = 2.5 km), as a part of its Permanent Updating Program. The program aims at providing society with a digital, vector, structured, integrated and continuous cartographic base, which is updated for the whole Brazilian territory, providing access to information on positioning, geographic name and classification of the represented elements. Vector data can be edited, allowing users to adapt them to their needs. The Continuous Cartographic Base of Brazil at 1:250,000 scale is available here.

The Continuous Cartographic Base for the national territory at 1:250,000 scale was designed by the IBGE to serve as a cartographic reference to land planning, monitoring and management, and information updating of the country's natural resources. The 2015 version of the BC250 was produced based on the latest orbital images of best spatial resolution, as well as on information on field work, which allowed for the updating of several data.

The following categories were prioritized: localities (cities, villages, isolated rural agglomerations and built-up areas), river basins (body of water, portion of body of water, drain passage, barrage, rapid and islands), borders (municipality border, Federation Unit border, country border, units of full protection, sustainable use and Indian lands), transportation systems (highway section, railway section, bridges, landing runway and crossings) and energy and communication (hydroelectric, thermoelectric, power sections).

The BC250 is available in open formats (shapefile and dump/PostGis), to be used in Geographic Information Systems, and is compatible with a number of softwares that can read this kind of data. Its modeling is implemented according to the Technical Specifications for Vector Geospatial Data Structure - version 2.1 (ET-EDGV v2.1), comprising seven of the 13 expected information categories: river basins, transportation systems, energy and communication, water supply and sanitation, economic structure, localities and borders.