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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 They also need to be accurate down to the street level and no more than 10 years out of date.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'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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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>
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.
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.