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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 They also need to be accurate down to the street level and no more than 10 years out of date.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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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/
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
There are a few oddities I've noticed, often due to the boundaries for bodies of water being defined at the province or stare level, and not being detailed enough at the local level. But often they are quite good.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
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.
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?
Yeah, this is the kind of /. question that drives me nuts. "I want some map data, with a whole bunch of constraints on what kind it is, and I want it to be free. Oh, by the way, I found exactly that from the USGS. However, in spite of the fact that there are tens or maybe hundreds of open source projects that use it just fine, I can't figure out how. So that's no good."
The first page of freshmeat.net after searching for "tiger" contains a link to this open source TIGER map server. Maybe that would be a good starting point. Further down the page are getmap and geotools, which also support TIGER.
I wish submitters and especially editors would realize that when they don't do their homework, they're wasting the time of literally hundreds of thousands of people. Sometimes a lot of time, like when the idiots actually waste extra time writing a long-winded reply.
TIGER data are as accurate as any commercial data source you will use, as there is a single provider of road data for everyone.
o po.html), therefore the original sponsor of the data was the US Government itself. You can't get any better than that I think.
Apparently, GDT Inc. is the provider of street network for all major GIS Software corporations (including MapInfo, ESRI, Intergraph and others) and government entities. Perhaps the most important information on this company is the Department of Commerce publication CB96-194 of 1996, which announces that the US Census Bureau would acquire data from GDT Inc. in a long term cooperation effort to have an up-to-date TIGER database.
The question from where GDT Inc. acquired their data is further hidden, apart from the fact that they used USGS data. A hint towards the answer is found in meta data from the USGS (specifically http://minerals.usgs.gov/sddp/doc/roads.txt), clearly indicating that the data were derived from TIGER/Line files. This means that GDT Inc. did not provide the data for the US Census, rather, it provided updates to the existing data. Therefore the source goes back to the US Census Bureau, that actually provides information on their data in a more straightforward way.
To compile the TIGER data, 1:100,000 USGS topographic maps were digitized by USGS on behalf of the Census Bureau. For urban regions, GBF/DIME files created in the 70's were used, that were updated in 1981 and 1985. Therefore one of the originating sources has been traced back to the Census Bureau (the urban area data). The other originator, USGS has a longer history. The attempts to map the USA started in 1879, on a scale of 1:24,000. Therefore the 1:100,000 maps used to create the US Census maps are derivations of 1:24,000 maps that started being compiled in 1879 and update since then by planetable surveying. After the 1930's, aerial photographs were used. The original purpose on creating these very first maps was a mandate by Congress to "classify public lands" (http://mac.usgs.gov/mac/isb/pubs/booklets/topo/t
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"
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.
This is correct. Unfortunately, when the TIGER data was first derived from the USGS 1:100,000 data, they omitted some of the points along lines to keep the file sizes down. This was done on an ad hoc basis. If you compare the original Tiger '90 data with the same vintage DLGs (about the time this became generally available), you can track this in great detail. Things diverged from there and the newer TIGER data has been improved a great deal. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a lot of cross-pollination between the USGS and Census folks.
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.
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>
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.
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.
VMAP0 is crude compared to what is out there, and is not particularly reliable. For example, the Nile river is 1 mile or so mislocated at points. It may be the best worldwide vector map available for the price, BUT ...
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.
Geobase has been a great source for my work (http://www.geobase.ca/) in Canada but it does not have detailed vector maps. Great source of data for Landsat and DEM's where available. If you need maps in BC, they have opened up a lot of data. Check out http://www.em.gov.bc.ca/Mining/Geolsurv/MapPlace/. The site is a little convoluted but there are some really good data there for free.
Word on the street is that Canada is opening up more and more data. The tax payers paid for the data so we should have rightful access to it.
You can also check out http://www.cits.rncan.gc.ca/, you have to pay for this data. But my understanding is that more and more of this data will be moving over to geobase. I could be wrong though...
Forgot to mention this.... Daniel Faivre is giving a paper at the Open Source GIS conference (http://www.omsug.ca/osgis2004/) titled "Public Geodata License: Open source license initiative for geographical data". I am going, and can submit an update on Slashdot if he says anything interesting.
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.
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.
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: