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Open Maps?
Chilltowner asks: "I'm trying to get local (US) maps together for a community project. I want to able to modify and annotate the maps and provide them free to the public, creating a derivative open work. They also need to be accurate down to the street level and no more than 10 years out of date. I've been searching around for maps available in the public domain or under open licenses, like the Creative Commons licenses allowing derivative works. I've looked at the National Atlas, but the maps, though interesting, aren't detailed enough with street information. The topographical and aerial image maps available through that site are from Terraserver, which are copyrighted to Microsoft. Plus, I really just need simple vector road maps, not USGS rasters. I tried looking at the Census Bureau's TIGER line data, but I can't make heads or tails of it. Are there maps available through other agencies (national or international)? Are there Free/Open-Source Software projects that are making use of public data to build street-level maps for free (as in speech) use?"
FreeGIs project?
The FreeGIS Project provides * software overview on free Geographic Information Systems (this web site)
* communication on developments, plans, infos on free GIS software and free Geo-Data (mailing list)
* software and data prepared for direct use (CD)
http://freegis.org/
Maybe it's possible to buy a database of that information and make it your own? I don't think map24.com, for example, started from scratch... That would be a hell of a lot of work.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I've seen several projects where people use their PDA/GPS to map their daily route. Maybe it's time someone organized a collective mapping project, for release cunder the creative commons license.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
They're out of copyright by now, and unless you're in one of those fancy "new" cities like Phoenix, they'll probably be pretty close to how things are now, or at least easy enough to add to.
People have been making maps for hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years.
Hell a Japanese guy with no formal mathematical training was able to figure out how to make very accurate maps (especially considering the poor accuracy of the maps of Europe) using no more than 300 men, several teams of horses, and large sextants and compasses.
Why don't you start up a mapping project on your own and put a subproject idea under the main banner encouraging people to implement whatever harebrained scheme you are talking about. The community will enjoy your work and you will gain notoriety as the guy who opened maps to the world.
No, that is MS's way as told by the extremely large number of successful lawsuits against them. GNU has not had one successfull lawsuit against it.
The USGS has this really cool thing they call the 'national map' (http://nationalmap.usgs.gov/nmjump.html) that will display all sorts of information down to the street level and it allows you to download and print the maps you display along with the information. But enough of that, go check it out for yourself, enjoy!
For a more direct link: http://nmviewogc.cr.usgs.gov/viewer.htm
Then look for "TIGER PostGIS" to find tools which support both formats, and find something to read TIGER into PostGIS. Then look at editing and display tools to find one which supports PostGIS.
Maybe I've missed something, but I was under the impression that the arial and topo maps presented via terraserver were copyrighted/owned by the people that put them together in the first place. I don't think Microsoft, as much as we may think otherwise, has mapping sats in orbit. Last time I checked, the data itself belonged to people like the USGS.
The maps are where the GPS device companies make their profit. That and accessories ($35USD for an AC car adapter!).
If I were to ever start my own Open/Free project, it would most likely be a call to all us GPS hobbyist out there to create our own Open/Free maps and GPS coordinates of useful landmarks.
Excellent Ask Slashdot question...
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
That's the best your going to do for free.
You could check the FEMA site. I'm not sure what license they use and the maps might just be from USGS.
The maps are intended for flood plain information and I recall some difficulty in finding my street back when I needed to use their system. You can't just enter an address and get a map with a red X. You need to figure out what part of the grid your in and select your panel.
Go to freshmeat and search for "tiger maps"; check out the Tiger Map Server project.
Note that they don't have labels rendered on the streets yet, but plan to add this. However, all the code is there, and the data is available, so there's no need to reinvent the wheel here.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Take another look at the Tiger Files, they really are one of the best sources of data you can use. In fact, I have found that the tiger files are even more accurate than MapQuest for rural Utah towns. (However, MapQuest has them beat for more populous areas.)
Not only do the files include streets, but it also covers bodies of water, railways, etc.. You can even retrieve additional information such as school districts and voting districts, which you can overlay on your maps.
Along with the files, you can download a 300 page PDF document fully detailing all the table structures and how to interpret the data.
Don't discount them just because it will take a bit of work to figure them out.
Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?
You can choose a number of color styles, and you can save the generated map as a gif file, which is can then edit with common software. Very configurable, and an account is not needed.
They also provide street numbers when you are zoomed in close enough.
Overall, worth a bookmark.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Why not check with the property appraisers in the area for which you seek a map. Most are to street level and are pretty up to date since the taxation depends on their accuracy?
I am from ontario and our ministry of transportation has detailed maps of the entire province on thier web site, I dont know how detailed they are at the city level but since they are owned by the province they would be public domain.
Local municipalities and county government will definitely have maps that are owned by the public. They will, for the most part, be very up to date and extremely accurate - right down to the blueprints and floor plans of buildings appearing on them.
If your project is focused on one local area, they're probably adaptable. If you're trying to put together a national database, it will be difficult. Each municipality will have very different maps in terms of scale, style and detail (is the utility map the same as the county assessor map? Or does each department keep its own maps?).
Unifying all of this data is what keeps map companies in business. It's a lot of work.
I'm trying to set up a similar to mapquest, but specifically to find bike friendly routes. I have searched around an the best data I have found is the tiger map data. The file naming scheme in not friendly but once you are past that it isn't so bad. Lood for opengis ( a cd of gis tools) to help process the data. Grass is a good tool, and mapserver from the university of Minnesota is a good web tool for displaying maps. The one downside of TIGER data is that it doesn't tell you if roads are connected or just pass over or under each other, and nothing about if a road is a one-way or not. My project if I get it off the ground will have a tool to gather that info with a handheld (zaurus) and a gps.
That's the coolest thing I've ever seen.
Yeah, there's definitely no point to Chilltowner's project--which is now nothing more than a hyperlink to the National Map.
As hyperlinks for the copy-and-paste impaired:
National Map
Direct link to viewer
copyrights are for a long fucking time in the USA.
Find one of those "old" maps. They're always engineering the roads. You'll find things are quite different now than then. They even change the names of the roads. Your Local "MLK drive" was called something different 30 years ago.
Bruce Perens once bought a data set of AFAIK exactly what you want from his own money and put it on his server for free use. Look here
http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/
Though I didn't get into the ftp server, I'm sure the files are still out there.
Very nice and forthlooking of him.
You can actually gain a pixel both ways by URL-modification. Might be easier to work with.
Either way - awesome site, definitely bookmarked.
Postgis, an add-on to postgres is a nice way to store map data. It does R-tree indexing, can store polygons, lines, and points, and can do coordinate system converison.
Tiger works quite well for me. I read the docs and wrote a simple perl script that took a sorted list of the road segments and intermediate points file, and inserted polylines into postgis. Tiger is off in a few places, which can be seen by overlaying it with more accurate data.
Another good source of data is the county assesors office. e.g. Clark County, Nevada, which builds a lot of new roads, has data available for free download in ARC/Info shape file format. (There exist converters to Postgis.)
Search for GIS, shape files, county assessor (+ your county name), etc.
The minnesota map server is a nice way to build maps images from shape files or postgis databases.
And GRASS, available in Debian, is a more complex database system for manipulating GIS data. It handles import, export, transform, mapping image files, and so forth.
The above link is a redirect to a page which hijacks your browser.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics maintains a lot of street data in its National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD). It doesn't have all the streets, but it does have major routes &etc. They'll send you a CD for free if you're a US resident. Look under "Geospatial Information" in the above link.
You won't find free, alleyway-level data for the US. It's simply too much of a burden to keep such data updated, without doing so as a commercial enterprise.
Tiger is the format of the census files and they list every road where people live or work in theory. They are also only accurate for time of the census (1990,2000,2010) and some of the pre/post processing checks (1989,1992,1999,2002,2005,...) and are accurate relitive to the local map datum which may or may not be anywhere close to WGS-84 (which is what your GPS will most likly default to). A while back a new group was set up to prevent the duplication of work between the Census dept and others that also need the same data (USPS, Dept of Interior, USDA). I'm not sure what that dept is called.
There are plenty of resources on the net about how to parse Tiger line data and most of the main mapping programs that do street level views where based on that data with many corrections. For example its common that older streets will be on a state map datum and improperly adjusted to NAD27 and/or WGS85 or something else. You can find roads that aren't parallel even though they all are directly north or you can get some interesting results when one township was on one datum and the next township over was in a different one which results in the streets appearing to be in the order of 1st, 3rd, 2nd. You also have things like auto placement where one road is just so out of place, auto placement aginst sat photos puts the wrong name on it and somehow it bounces the correctly named road someplace else. The plan was to clean that up for the 2000 census data but I think the task was just too large.
There is a programm called "Grass" that will read in these files. It might be a place to start.
You might want to do a google groups search in the newsgroup sci.geo.cartography as well.
Just a quick FYI... terraserver images are not copyright of Microsoft ... the technical name for the images are "Digital Ortho Quadrangle" and their supplied by the USGS. Microsoft can claim copyright on the interface, etc., but not the images.
You can obtain more information about DOQs on the USGS web site. Start by searching google...
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I've been wanting this for a while, but lack the technical skills. I tried looking it up on shouldexist.com, where I posted the idea in the first place, but it's down at the moment... here's the google cache.
8 J: www.shouldexist.org/story/2002/1/20/154726/325+ult ra+map&hl=en
http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:umBU4Yg0iL
I've had thoughts about this before, but why not have cities/towns/municipilities/ect which already have maps detailed down to the street level digitize these maps in a way that allows easy modification? That way, say a new housing development is brought into a section of town. It would be easy to just mark off houses ans street positions. If whoever would handle the mapping service for the town could integrate with the departments that handles zoning permits and other related topics, wouldn't this be feasible?
See: http://geoengine.nima.mil/ The vmap0 data contains roads, railways, cities, shorelines, et cetera. It's used by Terragear and FlightGear, so it has a GPL compatible license. http://www.terragear.org/ http://www.flightqear.org/
Keyhole isn't free, but it's worth looking at - if you're into flying over a 3d model and zooming into practically anywhere!
It streams the data, 3d and 2d, while you moved around the globe.
TerraServer-USA data is not copyright by Microsoft or anyone else, as is very clearly stated on their FAQ page:
Jeeze. 1/2 second of research and we wouldn't have to deal with stupid crap.
As I discovered in March, you can use the Terraserver images copyright-free.
See the FAQ.
(I mistakenly believed you couldn't use the Terraserver images either when I wrote my blog in January)
the map data is available from the USGS for free: http://www.usgs.gov/pubprod/digitaldata.html you are looking for the DLG/SDTS datasets to view and edit you need a GIS package: http://mcmcweb.er.usgs.gov/drc/dlgv32pro/ is a simple win32 viewer from USGS GRASS/GIS http://grass.itc.it/index.html is a common cross platform full featured GIS system ( pretty steep learning curve)
Now a days most of ppl have handheld GPS device or car fited with it. If there is any site where some one can upload all trip path and direction that is saved in GPS. this way it is easy to draw map. 2nd if lot of ppl drive same route again and again then it can be refined to even up +/- couple of feets
Even commercial map software is, in my experience, quite inaccurate. I was looking at a certain area lately, and I picked out many errors in my county and some of the surrounding counties (blatent errors, too...). Trying to use mapping software for giving driving directions to other people is frustrating.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
In this present day and age, you may have officials from HLS or FBI come knocking wondering what on earth you need maps for ...
Where can I find GPS-calibrated maps? Or just GPS calibrations for these other standard map formats? And while we're at it, how about a GPS points exchange, for swapping points, paths and tracks?
--
make install -not war
I wonder if the USGS maps at topozone.com are the starting point you're looking for. take a look: here.
Take a look at WiGLE (Wireless Geographic Logging Engine)
I'm using it just for the maps, but it has GPS and wifi capabilities (People use it for wardriving). I'm pretty suprised at how accurate the maps are, even for the middle of nowhere Nebraska.
After what was once a reprehensible double-taxation scheme (paying taxes to collect data, paying taxes to receive data), the Manitoba Land Initiative (that's Manitoba, Canada) now offers almost all publically available data sets free and online. MLI + GRASS = free GIS base
Avoid using the TIGER data. It is topologically correct (junctions are correct), but the absolute position location is poor. The USGS Digital Line Graphs (DLGs) are much better. The DLG-3 Optional format is quite easy to decode and has the entire USA at 1:100,000 scale. This is accurate to about 100 feet but a bit dated (80s and 90s). The 1:24,000 (quadrangle) scale maps are also available but in SDTS format which is pretty hard to decode, but open source code is available to decode it. Accuracy is about 50' or better, more detail, but coverage is often spotty. The EROS data center is your best source: http://edc.usgs.gov/geodata/
I too, was looking for a public domain mapping system to assist in a site we are doing about the Big Island of Hawai'i (www.instanthawaii.com). After scouring for sources the National Map Viewer was the best bet. All their data is in the public domain and can be used in a variety of ways.
Once you go to the site you will receive a very nice GUI interface with selections on the left and right and in the middle a map of the US including Hawai'i.
Using your cursor, click and drag a rectangle around the area you are interested in and it will zoom in on your screen. You can continue to zoom in using the same technique (or just clicking in the center of where you want to zoom) but don't zoom past the SCALE=1 graph on the upper right corner (scales below 1 pixelate). At a scale of one the map shows very detailed information - roads are visible, etc.
Now the real fun begins... using the options on the RIGHT SIDE, click each one and look at what they offer. The offerings will change depending on the scale (at a scale of 1, all offerings that are available will be allowed) - some offerings disappear at higher resolutions). THese options act like overlays - you can get street maps, water usage, historical maps, topographical maps, etc. Some of the layers will overwrite other layers so if you want a more complex map you might have to take a number of snapshots.
The selections on the left side are rarely used - except to rezoom the map and scroll the map side to side.
Using this system I was able to generate at a scale of 1, the entire Big Island as a series of over 80 screen shots that I remerged in photoshop to create on HUGE (over 200 megabytes) map that includes all topographical information, roads and rivers and streams. Since this is a volcanic island the map shows most of the craters (anything deeper than about 250 to 300 feet) and quite a few craters I didn't know existed.
This is one of the best tools out there - is a bit tedious to use but once you get the hang of it - it is invaluable.
The US EPA and NOAA have a free (as in beer) computer program called MARPLOT.
It was initially meant to be used by emergency responders as part of the "Computer Aided-Management of Emergency Operations" or CAMEO. It was so popular that the US Census Bureau made it part of the Landview software program.
It's not as nice as a professional program, but there are lots of basic features and the price is right.
My father is a blogger.
At our website the maps we use are based on TIGER 2002, and we're homogenizing TIGER 2003 as I type this. It's not easy to parse TIGER, but there are tools out there to do this for you. We had to integrate some features to fix some of the errors in the TIGER format, and a few other things.
Also, we're starting to publish our data (maps and other) -- just trying to figure it all out, and determine the best way to do this (suggestions are welcome!). Currently, our map engine supports some form of XML output, so we're experimenting with this at this stage.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Here are the two places where I get all my map data:
Bureau of transportation statistics. Detailed data, but only down to the highway/interstate level, no residential roads.(Shapefile format)
Tiger/Line data converted into shapefiles for easy use. Down to the residential street level, very detailed!
I live in Johnson County, Kansas, and they have a very impressive mapping system available online. (it is most functional in IE, but Mozilla etc. will let you do the basics)
You can find individual properties (complete with tax appraisal information, square footage, room count, etc. -- did you know this is all public information?), property lines, estimates acreage, building outlines, etc. You can map water pipes, power lines, fire hydrants -- even many trees are included. Fire stations, parks, museums, streams, neighborhoods (plats), cities, etc. It's all there.
Very impressive! Check and see if your county does the same! I can't tell you how valuable this tool was as we were shopping for a house (we closed yesterday!)
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Windows only crap? what are u doing posting this on slashdot?
Project: RoadMap: Summary
/ /tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/mapbrowse-tblw w.census.gov/geo/www/maps/CP_MapProducts. htmo rg/news/news.en.htmlc oma p_ap plication_poly_server.html
:Vector Graphics
http://sourceforge.net/projects/roadmap/
http:
http://w
http://opensourcegis.org/
http://fsffrance.
http://www.map-collections.
http://www.mapimage.com/grass_latitude_maps_m
GI - http://maps.langenberg.com/
A navigation system that displays US street maps (from the US Census Bureau) and tracks a vehicule using GPS. Specific areas can be displayed by selecting a street address (street number & name, city, and state). RoadMap can run on iPAQ and Zaurus.
Developer Info
Project Admins:
pascmartin
Personal Information
User ID: 11734
Login Name: pascmartin
Publicly Displayed Name: Pascal F Martin
Email Address: pascmartin at users.sourceforge.net
Site Member Since: 2000-02-06 13:19
* Development Status: 5 - Production/Stable
* Environment: Handhelds/PDA's, X11 Applications
* Intended Audience: End Users/Desktop
* License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
* Natural Language: English
* Operating System: POSIX
* Programming Language: C
* Topic: Viewers, GIS
I hope this helps - OldHawk777
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
so go nuts with whatever you can get your hands on. At least that's what the law was the last time I checked: you can't copyright a fact (or a made up fact for that matter), although some people are trying to change this.
I had a the pleasure of once working for a map company, for example, that at a time (before I worked there of course) traced a competitor's maps when drafting their products. An ensuing lawsuit, during which the judge actually acknowledged this practice, resulted in a verdict in favor of allowing such infringements.
GIS is a new-ish field, still developping very fast. A lot of tools are fairly mature, but the prices are still high, interoperability is getting good but there aren't many mature commodity components.
:(
:)
The major industry effort towards interop seems to be OpenGIS.
Some open source GIS stuff that looks promising to me are Mapserver and OpenMap.
I found the learning curve too much at this point, and many of the OSS solutions didn't work straight out of the box. Proprietary solutions are so expensive that they made playing around impossible.
What's more, getting data was difficult. Your city should be able to share its digitized maps. Here in Canada, my city was reluctant to share them, as some are copyright to ESRI (imagine your city co-owning its information with a foreign company!!!). What I found out however is that there isn't any copyright if you take the paper maps they publish and digitize it yourself. Time consuming, I know
There are a lot of useful hacks that I wanted to do with geographic data, but I shelved those plans for now. Hopefully in a year or so we will have better tools and cheaper data. If you manage to help us get there, thanks in advance
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
A friend of mine worked for Champion Maps in the late 1980s. When he drew a "new" map he did it by purchasing the competion's maps and copying them. He had to work from the maps of at least three competitors because they would introduce small errors as a "signature" to catch copyright infringements. When he found an anomaly he would copy the two maps that agreed. He would introduce his own errors as his "signature".
I expect this technique applies to datasets as well.
May not be exactly the same, but FlightGear has a pretty good database of global 3D geography. AFAIK it's all Free.
I'd *love* to make an easy to use way to create scenic flythrus based on FG's graphics engine. The work is pretty much done, it's just that their program integrates it with a flight simulator.
There is an interesting project called BBBike (Berlin & Brandenburg Bike) which might be relevant.
It is a system designed (initially) to map the streets of Berlin and surrounds, so as to make traversal of the city more easy for bike riders.
It's written in Perl and there is nothing really to tie it to Berlin. The data could be for any city. It has many features, and allows you to automatically plot a course across the city (conditional on whether you want the scenic route, or better road surfaces, etc.) I think it can even integrate GPS data to plot your course in real time.
I suspect that the USGS DLG maps are the source of a lot of other maps. The above post does a good job of explaining their limitations, but they are very useful for many, many mapping tasks. The only problem with them is translating the format. I just went ahead and bought a US$180 app that loads the files, lets you view them and will export them in many formats. I used SVG becuase that's what I'm trying to base my map server on. (I need to tie into a database and display search results semi-dynamically, and SVG seems to be the way to go.)
The lack of free, accurate, detailed and comprehensive GIS data is *the* canonical problem obstructing development of free GIS software. We are talking about current street-level data, points of interest, geographic features, topographic data etc., preferably on a global scale.
There is certainly free data for various regions (esp. US, various sources already mentioned) and some of it is detailed and accurate, but it is generally not even close to the quality that users expect in comparison to commercial mapping products.
To give you an idea of the effort involved in assembling maps from available GIS sources, I have heard that Microsoft's mapping team has over a hundred GIS developers constructing the maps for their MapPoint/Streets&Trips/AutoRoute products. And MS mostly just assemble data they license from various commercial sources (which has already been cleaned and standardised before it reaches MS). These maps are actually very good for the price (I use them for driving around US and Europe). MS maps don't yet cover regions outside US and Europe because of lack of available mapping data in a usable format.
No flames please about US free data being sufficient - I am talking about the general problem, and although US free data is much much better than most places, it is still not up to the quality of commercial data.
Having said all that, there are some interesting projects using free data - e.g. Wissenbach Map uses free topographic and aerial maps and exchanges data with GPS receivers. There are also a large number of free programs (e.g. GPSBabel) for exchanging data with GPS receivers and the map file formats used by various GPS software vendors, and mapping programs which require the user to supply maps. Search for GPS or GIS on SourceForge for more projects. I also recall a project in Thailand where a couple of guys created their own maps by riding all over the country with GPS receivers and painstakingly adding information like road and location names.
Various people have suggested projects to develop an open source database of GIS to rival the commercial sources. That would enable a large number of cool apps that are not feasible otherwise. But this would be an enormous project - both the data collection and assembling it into maps. E.g. certain GIS data vendors have a number of vans out permanently driving US streets with GPS receivers - trying to cover all streets and keep them updated. They do this because the free data is too inaccurate and outdated.
Yes indeed! It is dangerous for us to know where we are. Only the government can be trusted to know where we are at any given time! We should make the US more like those bastions of justice and democracy, Russia and Turkey! In Russia, you can be jailed for having a GPS system, and in Turkey, topo maps are considered military secrets! We have already made our justice system like Pinochet's system of secrect courts and dissappeared people, why not extend that to 'dangerous' information like maps!
http://roadmap.digitalomaha.net/
.zip archive if needed, process it into my database, then generate the shape files - collected polygons and chains (my internal format - I need to conserve space and add speed hints for my Zaurus) and plot them in PDF or Qt, the latter you can pan and zoom. The polygons work fine in PDF, but I haven't yet figured out a "good" way in Qt to do the island in a lake. It isn't that difficult, and the Tiger format is well documented.
It parses Tiger data and uses either GTK (1 or 2) or Qt.
Roadmap includes street and address lookup.
The graphics aren't quite there (it doesn't handle polygons well though you get the outlines, nor cities), but it works well, and fast enough to do a moving map on a Zaurus.
It was easy for me to link it to Kismet so I can see APs by signal and channel popup on the moving map.
Tiger does have a 300 page document that explains the format, but there are problems. I've been trying my hand since roadmap development seems stalled.
1. The "polygons" are sometimes disjoint. For example, a lake with an island in the middle will have two loops to form a donut/annulus shape. This doesn't bother things like PDF or postscript (where you can do more than one moveto between fills - just plot all the boundaries and even/odd fill algorithm works out). Something like Qt with just a single chain of segments needs to play masking or XOR games.
The segments the polygons are composed of are also not organized so you must read them all and sort them (endpoint to matching start point) into their several loops.
2. The street types aren't accurate. Some 7 lane roads have the same coding as a two lane barely paved residential street. Also, there is no consistency for things like names of state roads (state road 20, state route 20, il 20, illinois 20, ill 20, M-20 (michigan), M 20...).
3. The normal "polygon" is a census tract, so a large city may be a mosaic of thousands. There are easy algorithms to find a boundary and create the larger polygons, but you do have to transform the data.
4. There are zero-size features for some "chains" (series of line segments). I.e. a polyline with only a start and end point, and both are the same.
There are probably more hiccups, but I have a program that can automatically fetch the tiger 2003
Lots of trips to the electronics store, comparatively few to buy condoms, or whatever.
Do not help this man! Everyone who is asking about maps is a suspected terrorist! Maps are essential in planning an effective terrorist action.
Seriously, mapping local area is a very good cooperative project.
LaJolla - Topography, Bathymetry, air photo, dive photos, helicopter photos, geologic map, seismic lines, ...
You'll need to get the iview3d free browser to view the model. I'm just taking a break from getting it ready for the NSF visualization competition. Someday soon, I will export this stuff to a more open format (probably my prefered form of OpenInventor/Coin).
A map that is a mushpot of variously updated information is going to be very confusing. Plus, you have all the trolling problems of Wikipedia without really the checks. Historical things don't change. If someone changes something I know for a fact, there's no problem correcting it. But did someone build a new road? Rename one? For each time, I'd have to check that *my* information isn't outdated before I revert it.
For once I think this is something better left to a government office that can put the maps in the public domain. Even metadata will have big trouble as "open data". Try tracking all the fly-by-night establishments in e.g. the restaurant or nightclub industry... good luck.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
it involved these so-called "trap" streets specifically. That's why I said you you can't copyright a made up fact as well as a real fact.
RadioMobile allows you to draw terrain elevation maps. Its primary use is to predict radio propagation, but one can use it for other purposes...
You should consider yourself lucky. Most of the information you need is already avaiable to you, in the public domain. As several other has mentioned, the Tiger-files will provide loads of information and you should really have a look at those (to convert them into your own format). It took a few weeks to do it, but the task is far from impossible.
:| If you're going to let other people use your data, please provide them in an open and accesible format, like WFS. Have a look at GeoServer and PostGIS (for PostgreSQL) or do as we do, store everything as GML - an open standard presented by OpenGIS (which also stands behind WFS and WMS). Take a look at their website which features quite a few important standards and other resources.
The other question asked is however much more important, what about completly open maps in a free for all use setting? As i mentioned, this is the case for the US, but quite far from the truth for some other countries in the world
Making data available as WMS or WFS allows other people to seamlessly integrate them into their own applications. Seeing an application just importing more and more information thats available by WMS is simply amazing. The norwegian rescue service uses an internal WMS-server for all their mapping data, which provides information about currents, weather, available ships in some parts of the world that supports the system and loads of other information. This comes from several different sources and are integrated into the application on the last step. All the seperate units are responsible for their own mapping data and can upgrade and improve their data at any time without any interaction from the end user.
We export information by WFS, although probably not very interesting for your use, it demonstrates the possibilities. You may browse our repository at OneMap by using our SVG client.
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
Free maps from the TIGER data, as well as the (free) software that draws them. Here's Gregg Townsend's package in Icon. (Icon is a free VHLL -- very high level language -- of which Unicon is the current development extension.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
I've always thought it would be neat to have a fleet of GPSs and transmitters in cars around the nation, with a system that would use the location of each transmitter to draw the roads people drive on.
You could start with any old road map, and use the system to verify and update it.
And if it was accessible through the web, real-time, it would be that much cooler.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
At least that's what the law was the last time I checked: you can't copyright a fact (or a made up fact for that matter)
Photographs would seem to be "facts" just like maps, perhaps even moreseo. Yet you -can- copyright a photograph.
And fiction novels are made up facts, yet you -can- copyright a novel.
First you have to decide what do you want to do? Do you want it to be able to do GIS or just serve maps? Do you want to have it look like mapquest? Then you need to use raster maps with the attendant space being taken up for storage. If you want speed and are not too concern about making it look pretty then you should use vector data. Depending upon which type of data you will use will then let you choose the software. There are many such as MapIt!, UMN Mapserver, OpenMap, etc. Personally I like UMN's Mapserver. It is in active development, has a very active and helpful mailing list and there are very few things which it can not do and it can use a very wide variety of spatial data formats.
Landmark locations and pictures are useful, but the point of GIS is to correlate multiple data sources.
What about other spatial data? I'd be interested in getting data on rainful, population density, vegitation levels, pollution levels, all that pointless junk.
For taxation purposes, counties, parishes and municipalities have records of real estate. Many of them have begun to move their records to GIS. Another potential source for information is 911. 911 led to standardized addresses even for rural locations. The postal service update to rural free delivery (RFD) is tied to it. Under the old RFD scheme, addresses were given in terms of route and box. To standardize mail delivery and 911 service, even rural locations now have number and street addresses.
These potential information sources reflect government modernization programs. I have no idea how widely they have been implemented.
http://vterrain.org/
from their site:
<b>The goal of VTP is to foster the creation of tools for easily constructing any part of the real world in interactive, 3D digital form.
This goal will require a synergetic convergence of the fields of CAD, GIS, visual simulation, surveying and remote sensing. VTP gathers information and tracks progress in areas such as procedural scene construction, feature extraction, and rendering algorithms. VTP writes and supports a set of software tools, including an interactive runtime environment (VTP Enviro). The tools and their source code are freely shared to help accelerate the adoption and development of the necessary technologies.
</b>
Check with your state's highway department to see if they have any maps available. Here in Oregon ODOT has a variety of maps available as PDF files or in Microstation format.
-- Steve
"Open Maps" would be very good if they allowed local people to update the maps in there area. Somthing like Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.) One chalange would be to get the data precise.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
See your local government (city, county, etc...) The Mapping companies get it from them. If not free, cheap and you can mark and copy all you want.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/faq.html#3.html
Most of them are public domain.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I remember finding once, a long time ago when I was doing some modeling/mapping projects for school, that the USGS provides some maps as vector (AutoCAD format [DWG, I think], to be precise). Furthermore, the data is stored within the file in layers. If you want, you can turn off property boundaries, for instance. Or, as might be more useful here, you can turn off everything but roads.
I don't have AutoCAD, but I do have CorelDRAW, which was also able to open and edit the files (and the various layers). I'm really sorry that I can't remember where I found these, but they're available for just about every quadrangle that USGS provides a raster topo map for.
Hope this helps!
--0x4A6D74
He wants maps which are under a Creative-Commons type of copyright licence because he wants to be able to publish derivative works such as annotated or modified versions of the original map . The copyright licences on most existing maps, as used by map24.com, are not compatible with Creative-Commons licences, which prevents him from using them.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
In Canada, there's a move towards making data, whose gathering was paid for by taxpayers, available for free. Manitoba has this set up, and other provinces will in the future. There is a sick amount of data on there. -RJack-45
There's a great open source project that you can use the tiger data with - Mapserver
Lots of tutorials there to, but it's a bit of a learning curve. Try it! I knew nothing about mapping, and in two months I had built a web application that could zoom down to the street level with selectable layers for all sorts of data.
http://grass.baylor.edu/
Always worked for me....
RJ
The Defense Mapping Agency, which now appears to be called the National Geospacial-Intelligence Agency, has been making detailed maps of the Earth for about half a century now. You might be able to put in a FOIA request for satellite images and maps in the possession of the agency. Technically, these maps and images made with public money should be free for any citizen of the US to obtain.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
UMN Mapserver works fairly well to display map files from nationalatlas.gov (water features, county boundaries, state boundaries, a lot else). I have used this to display points on state and county maps. I use data from the Tiger 2002 files to get long/late coordinates from an address in order to plot onto the map. The tiger files aren't 100% useful for mailing addresses, as they don't contain all streets and have no information about R.R. postal addresses. As far as understanding the tiger files goes, there are some help documents which explain what all the files are as well as their data formats.
Anything after Steamboat Willie and the creation of one "Michael Mouse" by Uncle Walt will retain perpetual copyright.
However streets are, mainly, publicly owned/maintained/created. Surveys by municipalities are in the public domain (tax payer and all that) - just like most NASA images.
Being able to USE that data, however, requires the use of some standard markup - which probably exists, but I'm no cartographer - with information about direction, intersections and angles of intersections and, perhaps speed.
This would be how your Nav System calmly says "make slight right turn onto BLAH"
Of interest to me would be a system where certain data would be modifyable. Eg. a 65MPH road might be modified to 20 MPH depending on current traffic conditions. You'd also want a class on each road so you could add a "never take" type of conditional if, say, you're biking and really don't want to be on a 12 lane interstate :) Trucks could also use routing for only roads that don't ban trucks.
Second year CS students would recognize any routing algorithms made from that data.
One might think that if data didn't exist, then state/federal/DARPA funding might be available for an open project like this. Unless they lock your ass in Guantanimo under the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act for resembling someone conspiring to think about perhaps doing something that displeases the Right Reverend John Ashcroft and the Ministry of Home Defense.
Maybe you could see if the FBI could put in a good word for you with the Dept of the Interior when they come visit you to ask why you need maps like this?
I'd provide a link but several of the mirrors are down. Quote the mirror page:
Wow! That's the coolest thing I've seen in a while. Looks to me like it's exactly what the guy is looking for--yes, works produced by government employees are in the public domain, and this appears to allow you to download vector data for roads and so forth.
demi
When I was working with TIGER files, they weren't maps. They were used for correlating census data to maps, a quite different thing.
It was a set of fixed length records (perhaps blocked) suitable for processing with Fortran. Each record contained things like:
9 digits of longitude, 9 digits of latitude (probably these were nnnn.nnnnn) census block face id, street name, street address range, city, zip, county, state
N.B.: It's been a number of years, so this memory is a bit fuzzy. The idea is that this allows one to locate any census block on a map. It's not a replacement for a map (though it certainly could help).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
There's been a lot of questions about what the government can and cannot copyright. Here's some relevant information:
Another good resource is the Copyright FAQ here, which elaborates on both of those points.
Disclaimer: These resources are for the U.S. YMMV. IANAL.
geocoder.us
-Tom
wearable computing news
Try GlobalMapper (www.globalmapper.com) software, also known in a limited form as DLGV32PRO (check Google for a USGS site). Both are versions of the same thing - limited capabilities for free, everything for a relatively modest price (~$100-200 versus $1000's for heavy duty GIS S/W). GlobalMapper will also allow you to save raster and vector data in a different format. Very powerful for the price.
The link works just fine for me. Methinks you should start looking for malware on your box ...
I'm actually working on such a program right now, but it's so pre-alpha that I haven't even put it on sourceforge yet. A problem of relying strictly on aerial photographs is that they are usually years old, so any recent road construction wouldn't be present.
Your best (free) bet is probably TIGER data in either its original form or in shapefile form, updated and corrected locally.
TIGER is made from USGS DLG or DRG files, combined with some updating done by the US Census Bureau. Since the census is only done periodically, the TIGER data gets out of date.
Some organizations take TIGER data and update it and resell it in various forms. One of these is NAVTEQ, who has people out on the road constantly driving around and updating their maps. As a result, this information tends to be rather expensive, but pretty high quality. Other companies in the same business are DeLorme and UnderTow (formerly Chicago Mapping, I believe). I think UnderTow's Precision Mapping product has pretty decent licensing terms, last I looked at it (several years ago). Much better than DeLorme.
If you want to get your own imagery and work from that, there are several good free sources:
University of Maryland's GLCF site serves up 30m color imagery and 15m monochrome imagery for most of the world. To make the color imagery useful, you'll want to take a look at Scott Cherba's Tutorial using Photoshop or Terrainmap's tutorial using PaintShop Pro. One of the software companies I've founded makes an inexpensive utility called PixelSense (Windows, $49) to do this process automatically.
The United States Department of Agriculture Lighthouse Server serves up a variety of data including free 1m monochrome mosaics of virtually every county in the US. These are large files, and come in MrSID format, for which you'll need to download a Viewer (time-limited trial version) that can save out the portions you want. The nice thing about this is that they are mosaiced and brightness-balanced, whereas if you just go buy/download a bunch of DOQQs elsewhere, they may not match well at the edges of each file.
Finally, in urban areas, you may be able to take advantage of the USGS Urban Areas High-Resolution Orthoimagery available for some cities from the USGS Seamless Server. This data is fantastic, 1ft resolution color airphotos. You can see cars and individual people. It's very recent, having been aquired after 2001 for national disaster planning and response purposes.
Good luck. I'd be happy to answer questions you might have privately, as a lot of my customers do cartography.
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
Most 911 districts (or other public safety / emergency management agencies that run the 911 phone systems) have very detailed GIS street map data which is used to feed the public safety dispatch systems. It's usually in ESRI format. In the USA you may be able to obtain copies for free, but bear in mind that merely asking for it these days will likely get your name put on a list that will be given to certain law enforcement types who'll be rather curious in why you're interested in such data and what you intend to do with it, and they'll be determining that for themselves, regardless of what explanation you might provide..
They spend over 50 million a year collecting, administratrating and publishing this information.
Their competition spends about the same. This is not something a couple of guys can collaborate on and come up with something meaningful.
The map editor requires MSIE and Adobe's SVG plug-in. Is there any way to work around this? (I'm on Linux)
Just out of curiosity, are there any Canadian map services like TIGER that anyone knows about?
You just had to set yourself up to the incumbent spelling nazi within us all, didn't you punk ;)
So, to restate the heading: good post, but it's "Hear, hear" (listen to this!) - not "here here".
What's the reasoning behind the national or international restriction? The local government handles building streets, and they're the ones who provide the maps. For example, the Texas Department of Transportation makes their maps available here.
I have had a Garmin eTrex Venture myself for nearly a year now, and it doesn't support downloading any real maps, only 1 MB of point-of-interest (POI) data, and it comes with a world city database (city locations only, not streets or roads). I find this a bit insufficient as a "map". Other Garmin eTrex models have several times more memory, allowing for detailed maps, but I agree that they are costly.
In any case, I have been using my eTrex Venture regularly wherever I have been since I bought it, and uploaded my track data as necessary when the memory has become full. The coverage is a bit limited, but given the appropriate software I'd be happy to process, compile and contribute what I have to some collaborative project.
I agree that attributes such as street names and numbers are essential, but without positional data the result will look like a subway map which isn't quite as interesting. The real problem here isn't acquiring the source data, but creating an infrastructure for processing and long-time maintenance of the data received, so that contributors won't be let down by seeing their hard work disappear into thin air. You need to keep track of contributors, accuracy and date of acquisition of the data, so that you can compare the quality of individual contributions to each other. It's similar to the development model for the Linux kernel, where someone has to decide what contributions will be added to it.
http://www.xastir.org
The Xastir project makes use of all kinds of different map types and can serve as example code for manipulating them all, including the Tiger maps.
You're obviously a bunch of terrorists up to no good !
Well, if the news article I was reading a few weeks ago is to be believed you are. As far as I could tell, a guy was arrested as a suspected terrorist because
a) He was a muslim
b) He had frequently accessed government records of building plans, electricity conduits, gas lines, etc.
Apparently, the fact that the guy was an architect was just a clever "cover story".
Ok, so there may have been more to the story than made the papers, but these days looking at maps is seen as a suspicious activity by our governments.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
You might try state level DOT's. I know that WA offers pretty good maps (in pdf mostly) on their DOT website, I imagine at least some other states would have the same.
OK, what's the difference between free (as in speech) and free (as in beer) again?
I can never remember, maybe it's too much free (as in beer)...
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
> This is not something a couple of guys can collaborate on and come up with something meaningful. I disagree on one side of that argument. That is of scale. A couple committed folks for a small city could do a heck of a lot -- and it would be a heck of a lot more meaningful to users in that locale. I'll go off on a tangent in another thread - but I believe in a grassroots data collection and creative commons style approach.
The product is not free of course, but it is quite cheap compared to other solutions out there. The free solutions also suck, unreliable and totally unsupported. Your best chance is definitely a commercial product like Mappoint, and mappoint is the best solution out there.
The TIGER2003 data is available. You can spend the time required t learn it or you can use the online available preconverted ones. You can also use the geocoded files available online. Its the most common US street mapping base among commercial programs so TIGER is worth the time.
Do a couple googles on APRS TIGER 2003 XASTIR and you can find them online.
Groovy. Tell me more!
All but the most rural of counties and cities usally post very good, up to date, and accurated gis data including street ceterline files on their websites. i would check you county assessor, public works, or gis department (if they have one). if you can't download it, call them and they will give it to you (in most cases they have to). you might get some flak from a control freak on the other end, but be persistent and they will hand it over. This stuff is usally the best because it is used to keep track of the repair projects the city or county are working on. in most cases, it has a very accurate set of address attributes attached to it. Also, since it is already public domain it can often be redistributed free of charge with a disclaimer and proper credit given to the source. The detail is often better and more accurate than commercial (crooks) vendors like gdt of navtech.
if not get the tiger stuff and most gis softwares can import it directly from what you pull down from the census. it is easier than it looks.
cheers and keep pounding the local govt' sources into handing over what we have already paid for once.
I'm putting together some web pages that generate thematic maps using the University of Minnesota's MapServer. All the datum and the info for the layers that I'm using were all public information, and free to use with little or no restriction.
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/
UMN's pages are also a very good source of information about Open Source and GIS in general.
I think the program I proposed would be especially useful in European and other countries (non-US) where free GIS data is hard to come by.
I would like to discuss this further with you. How can we touch base outside of slashdot? I'll open up an irc on irc.freenode.net where we can talk further. Channel #openmap - would that work for you?
As others have mentioned, the TIGER data is free and good. And not rocket science to figure out. However, you can also purchase ESRI shapefiles fairly cheaply, eg on ebay, and use a 3rd party program to view/change.
Where I work we use mapserver (mapscript actually), which I think is fairly smooth. One example of street annotations being directly read from shapefiles is here [beta version]. Right now the street annotation shows up only when zoomed, but is automatic and decent; you can export PDF's to print, and soon it will interactive in terms of adding comments for specific places. All open source.
Also, many many cities and counties have freely available gis data, usually in shapefile format, for download. This is often a touch more accurate than the tiger/esri files, but those are a great start.
Point is: There are lots of freely available sources for national and local street coverage. Most conform or are easily converted to a standard (often esri shapefile oriented) format. The data often comes with no license. There are lots of [open source] programs that do a good job of allowing changes and display of annotation.
I have worked with the tiger2k format and have code I'm willing to release.
Email shaun@linuxhost.cc if you're interested in sources or have questions about the tiger2k format itself.
I also have the full 4+GB tiger2k dataset.
Ok, so here's a screen shot of my maps generated from the Tiger2K RT1 and RT2 files. http://linuxhost.cc/~shaun/tigermap.jpeg .net. I'll be happy to release the sources. An installer that should include a map of salt lake county (tiger files are on county boundaries) is available at http://linuxhost.cc/~shaun/tigermap-setup.exe
The PHP/PostgreSQL code that I use to generate the map files is available if you wish to email me and request them.
It's written in MFC using Visual Studio
I love the idea of modifying maps.
"Hey, let's put a lake here, and change this bit of coastland so that my house now has a waterfrontage."
"I just modified the map. You now live inside an active volcano."
A dragon cave near my home sounds kinda cool. But I'd need a hill for that. Easily fixed...
I am anarch of all I survey.
I,m the IT Director for a county gov and my GIS dept provides complete vector map and tax data to the public as does every county GIS dept in the state that I am in. The data is provided in ESRI shapefile format and we place no restrictions on how the vector data is used. Giving away for free after you purchase would be okay. We only restrict the resale and/or redistribution of the photographic data. We charge a nominal fee, $100.00 for the dataset. Your local GIS dept would be your best source for accurate local data.
Many people here have listed city, county, state and federal data sources, but I didn't read mention of GIS Data or "Geodata" Collaboratives.
Throughout the country, regional councils of government (known by names such as Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), Association of Governments (AGs) and Council of Governments (COGs)) are forming, or have formed GIS Councils that administrate "GIS Collaboratives" in concert with, or at the direction of State GIS Councils/Commissions and the Federal Geographic Data Committee
These collaboratives contain GIS data from their member city, county and special district governments.
The NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REGIONAL COUNCILS maintains a directory of these regional councils of government. Here are a few examples from my neck of the woods:
March 2004 - Government policy vs Spatial info markets
Sure. I haven't played much with IRC. Do I simply connect to a random server and then type join #openmap or do I have to connect to a particular server? For now, I'll add a journal entry so we can discuss there.
At the risk of slashdotting myself, you may look into navsys which has the goal of becoming a world-wide mapping collaborative project
My current knowledge is mostly centered on GPS technology itself, not cartology so much of this is new to me. I'm currently working on a couple of projects in my spare time, including a small Windows CE program to map GIS data on a PocketPC, a small C++ program to do turn-by-turn directions given a network of nodes and segment info (to be integrated with the WinCE program in the future) and a GUI to prepare the data for the WinCE program. It seems like the GUI could be modified to download and upload GIS data to a server so people could coordinate their efforts.
I can't find a way to reply to your journal - can you add me as a "friend" (ahh schuks, that'd make me feel good :)
Tyler
I'll be on irc.freenode.net in a channel called openmap - if you happen to be around.
OK. Now that I've figured out how to do IRC I'll be there. I guess that explains why nobody has ever commented in my journal. I need to check my settings.
I've been thinking for a while... if geeks with computers in their cars would store GPS tracks everywhere they drive, and then upload them to a central server, any line segment which overlaps a lot of other people's line segments could be considered a road (as opposed to a driveway, or somebody went off-road or something). Maps could be created and updated automatically, and there would even be statistics about how much traffic is on each road, and the system would find out about new roads, road closures etc. But it would take a lot of geeks.
And everything is now available from the Census Bureau's FTP site.
What he bought was the 1997 TIGER/Line dataset on CD.
More recent versions can be simply downloaded.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Sounds like GML is even more inefficient than TIGER/Line, space-wise.
.IMG format in existence that in theory someone could create an open-source application to use either official Garmin MapSource data, or MapSource-format data generated from open sources (such as the TIGER/Line data)
This is one of the few cases where a binary format is a Good Thing.
Interestingly enough, there's enough documentation on the Garmin MapSource
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?