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 They also need to be accurate down to the street level and no more than 10 years out of date.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

Comments

Freegis?

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re:Freegis?

[ruckc]

good source of information, but doesn't come with maps.

Best place i have found maps is:

1) Tiger data (If you read the infosets long enough you can begin to undersdtand them)

2) Shapefiles from ESRI(These shapefiles were generated from Tiger data)

The software i prefer to use is Tiger Map Server The author of this software has also figured out a way to convert tiger data into his own shapefiles due to ESRI's license.

Best of luck!

Re:Freegis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tiger data (If you read the infosets long enough you can begin to undersdtand them)

Oh, no you don't. The last time I fell for that line, those "Magic Eye" scams almost drove me blind!

Re:Freegis?

[ruckc]

Hey it took me 3 months of reading randomly through the tigerline descriptions to understand it.

I still can't understand it well enough to do anything with it unless someone pays me to (Understanding = TIME * MONEY)

Re:Freegis?

[roman_mir]

After a while you don't see the infosets anymore, all you see is blond, brunet, redhead...

Re:Freegis?

[Spetiam]

The USGS also has maps viewable online. I'm not sure, but FOIA may make their maps part of the public domain. They talk about FOIA on the USGS web site, he might want to check that out. There's a ton of other information there that might be relevant.

Re:Freegis?

[gletham]

If you want street maps at that level you need to look at the local government or county webmaps out there. NAtional government sites don't maintain that kind of level of accuracy in the public realm. Try getting a tool like Geomedia Viewer and load some webmap services (see geographynetwork.com) and another good one is the WMS Viewer - a great example of what you can do with OpenSource GIS ... The Intergraph WMS Viewer (wmsviewer.com) facilitates collaboration of geospatial information stored in WMS sources. The thin-client Web-based application enables users to view one or more WMS servers accessed through Web sites that conform to the WMS interface standards defined by the OGC. Details here good luck Glenn - www.GISuser.com

Re:Freegis?

[LqqkOut]

Semi Off-topic, but I've been making great use of another .gov site recently for the weather - Sure beats the hell out of the other guys with their popups getting worse each day!

No need to re-invent the wheel

[The-Bus]

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.

Re:No need to re-invent the wheel

[Tomcat666]

I attended a speech of the inventor of Map24 - the CEO of Mapsolute.

- They get their data from three companies, TeleAtlas, NAVTEQ and AND. For quite some money you can get their databases consisting of GBs of maps, and use it the way you want. This is true at least for the EU version, different conditions might exist for the US maps (see map24.com bottom).

- The Map24 applet connects to their map server directly (just over a proxy), using their own Map Transport Protocol (MapTP). So in theory you are able to connect like the applet, and query the whole country at the highest zoom - getting GBs of vector information to use. But they'll probably notice, so don't try it. :)

Anyway, the conclusion is: Like most mapping websites, Map24 (Mapsolute) use commercial maps of mapping companies, they didn't start from scratch. But using it without shelling out a lot of money won't work.

Re:No need to re-invent the wheel

[dasmegabyte]

Here, here. But I think it's obvious this guy was more interested in the anti-commercial aspects of his project than in the technical ones...otherwise he'd have realized that raster maps -- which are just scanned images with coordinates added to the corners -- are far more readily available than vector maps, which are usually created BY HAND from raster maps. Which is what he's probably going to have to do if he doesn't just buy one outright: sit down with a copy of ArcInfo ($1500) and go line by line over a high def map, then cross reference the street info on another layer. A chore, for sure, but you only have to do it once. There are quite a few independent GIS consultants who will do the job for you for a fraction of the cost of said program...expect to pay $800 or so for the street map made from scratch.

Any way you look at it, it will be cheaper to buy the info if you want vectors AND street info. Get the town board behind you on this project! Get citizen support, the cost will be like $1 per resident I'm sure, well worth it. With these two in hand, you can get really good maps made up...and like I mentioned, you only need them made once (though you should update it once every six months or so along with new development).

Of course, you could get REALLY lucky, and discover somebody's already made really detailed digital maps of your area. The state and/or county probably have quite a bit, as might the USGS. Data from the USGS is free (though sometimes you have to pay for the bandwidth or media to get it), and many states have programs that provide free data IF AND ONLY IF you promise to give them any digitized maps you product (sound familiar? it's GPL for maps!). Here's the list for my county...you can also search that site for detailed (1 meter) orthoimagery that puts Terraserver to shame and 1:24 000 contour maps.

Maybe it's time

[lawpoop]

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.

Re:Maybe it's time

[snillfisk]

We've already done a bit of work on this, although not in any open projects yet. We do however have a small testbed for integrating and designing datasets in a SVG-client before going through a peer review process by others that have data in the same area.

Our white paper on the architecture may be seen at SVG Open from the 2003 proceedings. A small amount of information (including a live demo -- it does however require that someone accepts the data submitted, so don't expect to see anything in the gateway at once) is available here.

The idea is however a good one and is absolutely doable. The problem is that you'll probably get rather large datasets for the most used paths, while the roads noone travels frequently will remain unmapped (and those are really the roads that you _do_ need a map for)..

I'd suggest really old maps

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I'd suggest really old maps

[line.at.infinity]

I've seen some old aerial photographs of the city I live in (and I wouldn't be surprised if those photos were as old as webster 1913) but the major roads, rivers, and landmarks still remain in the same place. While we're at it, we could make a digitized map of the past (maybe some historians with grant access would be interested) and edit on top of these maps. The one problem would be the lack of GPS information from old maps, but that could be solved by extracting coordinates from the maps and photos, with probably reasonable accuracy.

The key to a copy-free solution would be maintenance. Just copy how the major map companies update their data. And the public would do a better job of it since as a whole the general public has more itches they want to scratch than the few paid workers who update maps. (e.g. "that road doesn't exist!!") As mentioned on /. way back when, one could drive around with a GPS coordinates recording device.

Re:I'd suggest really old maps

[cdrguru]

You can forget about accuracy with digitizing from aerial photographs. NavTech tried this for a long time and there are just too many corrections that needed to be applied to get things right. The photographs they were working from were paid for to be done "right" and they still didn't have the needed accuracy.

They now collect all geometry with differential GPS in car - driving all the roads.

Trust me, you aren't going to get anything usable from aerial photographs that were not created with this application in mind.

Making maps is not an esoteric science

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

USGS

[glass_window]

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

Re:USGS

[Technician]

Don't overlook commercial software. Much of it uses common data, but provides a nice user interface and features that may make the price reasonable. The price for map packages are falling rapidly as the early adoptors that will pay anything have already paid. Now the rush is on for market share. Take advantage of the corner gas station price wars. There is a war between Microsoft (no suprise) and Rand McNally for vector street maps. Microsoft is trying to keep the percieved value high by keeping the list price high but it trying to get market share with a heavy rebate. Street level vector maps are in the under $20 range for ones that work well with your GPS and PDA. Delorme got skunked on the unexpeded fight. They tried selling a map, then having the GPS and PDA stuff as seprate packages. Ooops sorry Delorme, you missed the boat.

On the TOPO side the war is between Delorme, and Natiional Geographic. Delorme sells a vector based topo map which is nice. National Geographic sells Rastor Maps of the USGS maps. The state series is a little spendy, but detailed. It's a clear winner if it is out for your state if you do off road and back road stuff. However having a picture of the streets is it's weak spot if you are trying to use it for street navigation. In a nutshell, if you use the TOPO maps by National Geographic, you will want another map for street use.

Just out from National Geographic is an answer the vector street problem. The Back Roads Explorer map combined the Raster Maps with a real time overlay of the street vector maps. The 17 CD set can be bought for under $40. It contains the entire USA TOPO and vector street maps. It's detail in the TOPO isn't as good as the state series, but you can load the state series into the package for the best of both.

Now the issue of marking them up and such. National Geographic permits printing of maps provided the copyright remains on the map (in the boarder, not imbeded like Mapquest). I'm not sure of the quanity or uses of the maps so more research will need done especialy for commercial use, but home printing and sending maps to your friends in your hunting party all marked up to the hunting camp is a permitted use. The tools to mark up the map are included and work well. Added to the ability to export to my PDA or handheld computer and connect to my GPS and upload, and download waypoints, routes and active track are all features that make this commercial map a winner.

Disclaimer, I don't work for National Geographic. I like to Geocache and finding a road in close to the cache is half the fun.

Re:USGS

[spatialguru]

That's a good overview of the options and issues, thanks.

The point that seems to be missed in the threads is that (as any fellow geocacher knows) street maps and topos just don't cut it for many applications.

Existing street mapping, etc. has some mass appeal and real utility, to be sure. But at many local levels, small private groups has whacks of spatial data that is never shared - and partly because no one would care anyway.

For example, forestry, environmental, regional governments and municipalities all have map reporting requirements (i.e. to gov't, public) - leveraging that data into the public domain provides excellent and more meaningful local information.

In short, folks need more than a good MapQuest. Show my the location of my house on a map and I'm slightly interested. Show me the path through the woods by the neighbour's house and I'll be impressed. Show me a localized plant hardiness map and I'll be excited.

Consider a geocache located in a landfill - Delorme ain't gonna warn ya! :) -Tyler

PostGIS

[SEWilco]

First, look at PostGIS. It is a geographic extension to PostgreSQL. That gives you a single place to store your data.

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.

Re:PostGIS

[po8]

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.

Re:PostGIS

[SEWilco]

Oops. Forgot the link: "I Am My Own Grandpa"

*scratches head*

[Akardam]

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.

Re:*scratches head*

[ericspinder]

Yes, you have "missed something" the National Atlas (a service of the USGS) is clearly public domain material. As is (I think) all published government sources. In fact, most of what the map makers do is based on government surveys and publications. The companies do some fact checking(some better than others), add "features", and consolidate information, but the 'base' work is often public domain.

Re:*scratches head*

[jamestedrick]

Map data produced by the US government is generally available royalty-free for reuse; once Microsoft/Delorme/RandMcnally modify/refine it, they can then apply their copyright to the derived product. In the UK, national mapping data is kept under crown copyright.

Re:*scratches head*

[Anonymous Coward]

It clearly states under the aerial photos on Terraserver website "Image courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey." As the previous poster said, this is reiterated in the FAQ. Anyone can reuse, repackage, redistribute, even sell information/maps/photos, etc produced and published by the federal government. They can even copyright the delivery method/software, etc but the original data cannot be copyrighted (the idea being that it was created with taxpayer money.) So any of the images on Terraserver can be used and manipulated in any way. For future reference, while you've gotten great information from everyone on this site, this is something you can actually ask about at the library (gasp!) believe it or not, there are Federal Depository Libraries all around the United States where librarians specialize in Government Information, and can actually answer questions like this. (Both where to find the maps and the copyright question.) Often these departments have Map libraries associated with them because of the large amount of geographic and geologic information produced by the federal government.

Re:*scratches head*

[aminorex]

umm... if they were older than dirt, what would they
be maps *of*?

Maps and accessories baby...

[chamilto0516]

I was suprised when I bought my GPS unit. The maps (or unlocking the maps that we shipped with it) were almost as expesive as the unit itself. I have a Garmin eTrex Venture and between the Garmin US and DeLorme TOPO USA, I have paid more for this data than the hardware.

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...

Re:Maps and accessories baby...

[cosmol]

Then as hundreds of people move about, all recording it, then you'll build a map.
That's sort of like the strategy ant colonies use to establish paths. It's interesting, but such a brute force method would duplicate much effort, and miss many routes. The data is out there, we just need to convert it into a usable format.

Re:Maps and accessories baby...

[SmurfButcher Bob]

That'd only give you positional accuracy, which is almost useless. What's needed is attribution for a given segment - what's the address block of the left side? The right? Are the addresses uniformly distributed? Any "even" numbered houses on the "odd" side of the street or vice-versa?

Then there's the type of street, directionality, names and aliases, speed limits, on-street parking, sidewalks left and right, bike-routes left and right, congestion levels (by time of day), max axle weight capability, max height clearance, lane counts (left and right), and other attribution (car-pools only, etc) that'd be relevent.

Positional accuracy of the segments is pretty much worthless by itself. Cool to look at in real time, but only useful in real time... which is stupid ("Look, ma! The map say's we're right HERE! And look, we ARE!")

Good attribution with crap positional accuracy is 1000000 times more useful than perfect position without such attributes, because it enables you to use the map BEFORE you go somewhere.

TIGER -- look again

[pb]

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.

Re:TIGER -- look again

[Jaysyn]

I think he's needing datasets & not predrawn maps. His best & cheapest bet would be to get the Free TIGER line files & read thru the 436pg manual on how to use them. That's what we did. I guess if time is a problem, then he's going to pay out the nose. Other resources include MapInfo Streetworks (not too expensive for the level of detail) & ESRI.

Jaysyn

Re:TIGER -- look again

[waykiorg]

I think TIGER is the way to go. One of the things about using TIGER data is that it has its own data format, however there are converters out there that will convert them to SHP format, which can be used with pretty much everything (i.e. MapServer and PostGIS). There are also companies that offer converted data from TIGER (albeit for a price, but it does take a little time to actually do the conversions yourself).

All of the street level labels are there too, which makes it a very good source of free data. I've been using the data for my own project and it was fairly easy to setup.

Tiger Files

[aef123]

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.

Re:Tiger Files

[BearInTheWoods]

The US Census Bureau's TIGER/Line data is very good (and free) for vector-based line data (roads, rivers, railways, etc).

That said, here are a few shortcomings in the TIGER/Line database:

• city database is incredibly incomplete -- lots and lots of the smaller towns are missing; this is surprising given the source of the data (Census Bureau); you'll want to get your town/city data elsewhere (e.g. USGS)
• point-based landmark data is inconsistent and poor (many important things seem to be missing while things like shopping malls are included, but very inconsistently)
• there is no 'freeway exit' information, making routing algorithms problematic
• there is no data to discern normal roads from '1-way' roads -- another problem for routing algorithms
• the database contains several errors (from simple mis-spellings to oddities in the supplied street address ranges)

Aside from those minor shortcomings, I find the TIGER/Line data very useful and hope it's not suddenly made unavailable by some bureaucratic nonsense.

What would be nice is a way to have an open-source/libre/gratis database to expand upon the TIGER/Line datasets.

Maporama

[Alien54]

I actually prefer using Maporama, which allows you to generate maps up to 999x999 pixels.

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.

Re:Maporama

[ColdWetDog]

I don't know about this - according to MapORama, my house in located in the middle of a giant body of water. It rains a lot around here, but not that much...

Re:Maporama

[Alien54]

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.

Property Appraisal Maps

[webber1]

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?

Try the County Assessor yet?

[dankney]

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.

Re:Try the County Assessor yet?

[stratjakt]

They may have maps, but not in a format that's ready to import into a computer and start cracking.

I work writing and installig public safety software (dispatching, police/fire/ems records, etc). Mapping is a big thing these days, especially for rural communities that are sprawled out over a huge area, yet have finite resources.

911 call from lot 12, rural route 15 - whos closest, Jeb or Clem? Or a fire engine pulls up to a fire, there's a hydrant next door, and one 6 houses up. Which one to use? Look at the map which gives the known flow rates for each - if the one six houses up can supply 10 times more water, that's what you want. Sex offenders can't live within a mile of a school or church.. Thematically mapping incidents by reporting district or beat, etc, etc, etc...

Most have paper maps that are 50 years old, and a stack of addendum paper maps. These are useless for my purpose, and you can't just sit there with a ruler and try and convert the various lots into lats/longs - it's not accurate enough. You need to the precise lat/long for 102 Main St to pinmap it, and whether decidegrees or HMS, a slight difference in the least significant digit puts the pin in the next county.

You'd be surprised how innacurate the older maps are. The courts are still clogged with suits over who owns this fence/tree/driveway because the old maps were so arbitrarily drawn.

Creating a good set of geolocation data really means a small army of guys with expensive GPS equipment pounding pavement, walking down the center of the roads as the computer plots it, walking to the vertices of the various polygons (school districts, beats, etc) while the GPS creates the data.

It's expensive and time consuming. Most smaller counties/cities dont have the budget for it. There's been a boom in it lately, I'm getting tons and tons of "homegrown" gps data from municipalites (of which the resulting maps look like dogshit, please if you're a city IS guy - contract it out, you aren't up to the task). Alot of depts are spending their cut of the Homesec dollars on this type of thing.

Anyhow, they dont exist for free - at least not at the level of detail that I need.

Re:Try the County Assessor yet?

[winwar]

Do you really need the accuracy and precision you are talking about? For 911 dispatch, who cares which property the tree is in. That level of precision and accuracy would be nice but is it needed or would the money be better spent elsewhere. Hell, USGS 7.5minute quads combined with Tiger, orthophoto, parcel data, and other info is probably good enough. I mean, how accurate is that water main map anyway.... After all, the responders have brains and in theory have at least a passing knowledge of the area...
Finally, in theory property lines used to create parcel maps were surveyed and you could just digitize them. Then georeference them. It should be good enough. If it isn't, then I doubt any amount of GPS is going to help at anything resembling a reasonable cost (if the maps are good enougth for people to find hydrants, water mains, property-then that can be transferred to the computer). Granted, it isn't easy. It's boring. It's tedious. It's time consuming. And the surveys and maps aren't always correct. But don't assume guys pounding pavement with a gps will do any better for anything resembling the same cost. Survey grade gps does not equal absolute gps accuracy. More correctly, you would need guys driving a van with differential gps to do better for roads at least(Navtech comes to mind)...

I'm looking too.

[Kent Swanson]

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.

HOLY CRAP

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:HOLY CRAP

[timothv]

If you thought that was cool, wait till you see map24.com

Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your Local "MLK drive" was called something different 30 years ago.

Typically, the "wrong side of the tracks".

Remember Mr Perens

[platypus]

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.

Re:Remember Mr Perens

[sonamchauhan]

Here's the Slashdot announcement.

Basically Bruce seems to have bought a copy of the dataset which was under a less-restrictive license (i.e. no license - public domain). He then re-issued it under the GPL, apparently with no changes/additions, other than making it available in a different media (CD-ROM).

Tiger, county assessor, postgis, and map server

[dunham]

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.

Above is troll.Re:NO WAY!

[rthille]

The above link is a redirect to a page which hijacks your browser.

Find the offsping of Tiger

[thogard]

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.

Terraserver copyright

[cr@ckwhore]

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...

TerraServer-USA is not copyright!

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeeze, it's amazing the level of stupidity seen in the average Slashdot article nowadays.

TerraServer-USA data is not copyright by Microsoft or anyone else, as is very clearly stated on their FAQ page:

Are there any restrictions on what I can do with the images that I download?

The images from the U.S. Geological Survey, and are freely available for you to download, use and re-distribute. The TerraServer team and the USGS appreciate credit for their work on this project by displaying the message "Image courtesy of the USGS".

Jeeze. 1/2 second of research and we wouldn't have to deal with stupid crap.

Watch out who you ask for information ...

[auburnate]

In this present day and age, you may have officials from HLS or FBI come knocking wondering what on earth you need maps for ...

GPS calibration

[Doc Ruby]

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?

WiGLE

[bryanthompson]

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.

Others have mentioned but...

[MrIcee]

I know other posts here have mentioned the NATIONAL MAP VIEWER but I thought I'd give my two cents on it and some more details.

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.

MARPLOT

[Big Sean O]

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.

County records

[LuxFX]

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!)

SourceForge Project and US Government Map Products

[OldHawk777]

Project: RoadMap: Summary

http://sourceforge.net/projects/roadmap/
http:/ /tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/mapbrowse-tbl
http://ww w.census.gov/geo/www/maps/CP_MapProducts. htm
http://opensourcegis.org/
http://fsffrance.o rg/news/news.en.html
http://www.map-collections.c om
http://www.mapimage.com/grass_latitude_maps_ma p_ap plication_poly_server.html

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 :Vector Graphics

* 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

Re:Avoid Tiger

[MoonChildCY]

TIGER data are as accurate as any commercial data source you will use, as there is a single provider of road data for everyone.

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/to po.html), therefore the original sponsor of the data was the US Government itself. You can't get any better than that I think.

Maps are not copyrighted

[tiltowait]

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.

Re:Maps are not copyrighted

[Frogg]

Maps likely have different copyrights depending on the map in question and what coutry's copyright laws are applicable to the map-bearer.

Here in England we have "Ordnance Survey" maps which are very high quality -- and are all covered by Crown Copyright (the government/queen's copyright -- I dunno how it's any different to any other copyright though).

Also, if you take a map to a copy shop here in the UK -- let's say, because you need to give your dad (who lives some way away) directions how to find your street -- many of them will tell you that they will not copy it for you (bah, just like when someone in your band needs another copy of some sheet music).

I have a feeling that the "Times' Atlas of the World" is also likely to a copyrighted work..!

GIS information

[danharan]

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 :)

Good free streetlevel data not likely anytime soon

[jsherring]

You might be able to find free GIS data for your location and put together a map to suit your needs, but if you are looking for good quality detailed maps, then your project will be limited by your ability to assemble and verify the GIS data for each region.

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.

Re:Avoid Tiger

[vlakkies]

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.

Userbase

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since you're talking about people who will synchronize their portable GPS software with an open-source mapping project, I think you might get a biased sample of the city.

Lots of trips to the electronics store, comparatively few to buy condoms, or whatever.

To put it shortly: Why?

[Kjella]

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

Since you're in the US..

[snillfisk]

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.

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 :| 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.

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.

Re:Since you're in the US..

[PantsWearer]

Since OpenGIS was brought up, I figured I'd chime in. I've been working with various OpenGIS standards for the last couple of years, so I'm familiar with them and also have some opinions about them.

WMS (Web Mapping Service) is a pretty good standard. It's simple and easily interoperable since you basically can type in a URL in your browser and come back with a map. Of course, since you get a static image back, you have to make another round trip to the map server to do any manipulation at all. In other words, it's really easy to use (and to implement), but it's use is both hard on your network and on the mapserver.

WFS (Web Feature Service) is a vector format for maps. In theory, this is really wonderful. You request the map area you want to see, a ton of vector data is downloaded to your viewer (SVG or other vector drawing tool) and you can zoom in and out as long as stay within the area you first requested and don't want to see anything new. This is a little bit harder on your processor, but with today's machines this isn't much of a problem. And it eliminates the round trip problem which WMS has.

It has it's problems though. A minor problem is that it doesn't support raster data (such as aerial or satellite imagery). This means, if you want to overlay aerial photos you'll have to hit a WMS for the photo itself and then put your vector data on top of it.

The major problem is the GML format itself. This is how a WFS sends data to you. It's a particularly verbose XML format that, as of the current standard for WFS, is uncompressed when shipped. Geographic vector data is data dense. As a simple example, say you want to give the lat/lon for every house in your neighborhood. You'd probably end up with a list of about 60 doubles (assuming 30 houses). Now print all that out in a text format and surround them with about four or five levels of XML tags. Not that you could easily write this up yourself: the GML specification is an incredibly dense, 300+ page document.

Basically, GML is an impractical solution because of the opaqueness of the standard and the sheer size of the data it produces. The standard's opaqueness isn't so bad, since more or less GML is only machine readable, but the size is a major roadblock.

I'm not saying that there are better standards out there. For example. ESRI's Shape file (an industry accepted "standard" which ESRI, who is the Microsoft of the GIS world, created) is one of the nastinest binary formats I've ever seen (why would you have a binary format that contains data in both little endian and big endian at the same time?), but at least it's size friendly. For example, a shape file of the state boundaries of the US might be about a megabyte (this would probably be only 1:1000000 scale or slightly better, so once you get down to a county level, the state boundaries would be really choppy). The equivalent GML file would be about an order of magnitude larger, so if a person wanted to view something of the sort in their browser without having to continuously download more detailed data (the WMS problem again), they would need to download about a gigabyte of data just to see the state borders and allow for some fairly high level panning and zooming.

Yes indeed!

[phliar]

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.

VTP needs a mention here....

[Antilles]

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>

No, he is not re-inventing the wheel

[FeatureBug]

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.

Mapserver

[ThesQuid]

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.

How about GRASS??

[Randyj70999]

http://grass.baylor.edu/

Always worked for me....

RJ

Freedom of Information Act Request

[LuYu]

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.

UMN Mapserver is free, can use nationalatlas.gov

[ftzdomino]

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.

Copyrights

[MrChuck]

Copyright law is clear.

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.

Re:Freegis? (Mod Parent Up!)

[demi]

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.

Copyright and the Government

[Baricom]

There's been a lot of questions about what the government can and cannot copyright. Here's some relevant information:

• The government cannot copyright their own works, but they can hold the copyright of others. Source
• Works by state (and local) governments are not necessarily in the public domain. Source

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.

Re:NIMA vmap0 data

[CharlieD]

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 ...

In my experience...

[XenonOfArcticus]

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.

Re:Canada?

[funkmeister]

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...

Re:Canada?

[funkmeister]

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.

Re:Digital Map Databases

[MrChuck]

To develop Exchange, Microsoft has spent millions of dollars, countless meeting hours and hundreds of developers work on it.

To develop Word, Microsoft has ... well the same (plus people to take ALL the F'ing suggestions for features and make sure everything gets added).

Sendmail took one guy, mainly, a semester or so and then a core of MAYBE 20 people to develop it.

Postfix was, in large part, a 1 person project.

Except for what Linus took from Minix (kidding!), a kernel was developed, without networking code, by one guy.

We can mutter about UIs and Gnome/KDE (hell, X11).

If anything can fall under the Million Monkey's Factor of Open Source, maps can.

I'm at an office where it takes dozens and dozens of people hours and meetings to add a line to a sendmail access file. But sometimes, I just do it in 12 seconds and get forgiveness later.

Opensource maps

[r_j_prahad]

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.

State and Regional GIS Data Collaboratives

[scupper]

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:

• (SANDAG)San Diego Association of Governments
• (ABAG) Association of Bay Area Governments
• (SACOG) Sacramento Area Council of Governments