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I know next to nothing about geographical data / cartography, but it would be nice to have these in SVG, like in this how to from Flowing Data:

I haven't looked, but it should be fairly easy to convert.

Unless the data is in one of the proprietary GIS formats, then you're in for a late night hellride. GDAL/OGR may be your friend, or may not.

It looks like a nice dataset, but only has center lines for rivers -- no polygon data.