Open Maps? 278
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 They also need to be accurate down to the street level and no more than 10 years out of date.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? (Score:5, Informative)
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/
No need to re-invent the wheel (Score:5, Informative)
USGS (Score:5, Informative)
For a more direct link: http://nmviewogc.cr.usgs.gov/viewer.htm
*scratches head* (Score:5, Informative)
TIGER -- look again (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Tiger Files (Score:5, Informative)
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.
maps on ontario (Score:1, Informative)
Try the County Assessor yet? (Score:3, Informative)
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 looking too. (Score:3, Informative)
HOLY CRAP (Score:2, Informative)
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 [usgs.gov]
Direct link to viewer [usgs.gov]
Remember Mr Perens (Score:5, Informative)
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, county assessor, postgis, and map server (Score:2, Informative)
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! (Score:3, Informative)
Find the offsping of Tiger (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
You can obtain more information about DOQs on the USGS web site. Start by searching google...
Re:TIGER -- look again (Score:4, Informative)
Jaysyn
Re:Maporama (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Try the County Assessor yet? (Score:2, Informative)
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:Freegis? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [esri.com](These shapefiles were generated from Tiger data)
The software i prefer to use is Tiger Map Server [toonarchive.com] 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!
WiGLE (Score:3, Informative)
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... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
SourceForge Project and US Government Map Products (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:PostGIS (Score:5, Informative)
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 [freshmeat.net]. Maybe that would be a good starting point. Further down the page are getmap [freshmeat.net] and geotools [freshmeat.net], 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:Avoid Tiger (Score:2, Informative)
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 information (Score:3, Informative)
The major industry effort towards interop seems to be OpenGIS [opengis.org].
Some open source GIS stuff that looks promising to me are Mapserver [umn.edu] and OpenMap [bbn.com].
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 (Score:2, Informative)
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 [cableone.net] uses free topographic and aerial maps and exchanges data with GPS receivers. There are also a large number of free programs (e.g. GPSBabel [sourceforge.net]) 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 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:*scratches head* (Score:3, Informative)
Re:TIGER -- look again (Score:3, Informative)
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 [wayki.org] and it was fairly easy to setup.
Since you're in the US.. (Score:4, Informative)
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 [onemap.org] by using our SVG client [onemap.org].
Yes indeed! (Score:3, Informative)
VTP needs a mention here.... (Score:3, Informative)
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>
Re:No need to re-invent the wheel (Score:5, Informative)
- 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.
How about GRASS?? (Score:2, Informative)
Always worked for me....
RJ
Freedom of Information Act Request (Score:3, Informative)
The Defense Mapping Agency, which now appears to be called the National Geospacial-Intelligence Agency [nima.mil], 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 (Score:3, Informative)
Copyrights (Score:3, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
Copyright and the Government (Score:3, Informative)
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 [eff.org], which elaborates on both of those points.
Disclaimer: These resources are for the U.S. YMMV. IANAL.
Re:Freegis? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tiger Files (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:NIMA vmap0 data (Score:2, Informative)
In my experience... (Score:3, Informative)
TIGER is made from USGS DLG [usgs.gov] or DRG [usgs.gov] files, combined with some updating done by the US Census Bureau [census.gov]. 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 [navteq.com], 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 [delorme.com] and UnderTow [undertowsoftware.com] (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 [umd.edu] 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 [cherba.com] using Photoshop or Terrainmap's tutorial [terrainmap.com] using PaintShop Pro. One of the software companies I've founded makes an inexpensive utility called PixelSense [alphapixel.com] (Windows, $49) to do this process automatically.
The United States Department of Agriculture Lighthouse Server [usda.gov] 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) [landsystems.com] 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 [usgs.net] available for some cities [usgs.gov] from the USGS Seamless Server [usgs.gov]. 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? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Canada? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Freegis? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Remember Mr Perens (Score:3, Informative)
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).
Use Mappoint From Microsoft (Score:0, Informative)
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.
Opensource maps (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
Many people here have listed city, county, state and federal data sources, but I didn't read mention of GIS Data or "Geodata" Collaboratives [geoall.net].
Throughout the country, regional councils of government (known by names such as Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs [sjsu.edu]), Association of Governments (AGs) and Council of Governments (COGs [sjsu.edu])) are forming, or have formed GIS Councils that administrate "GIS Collaboratives" in concert with, or at the direction of State [nsgic.org] GIS Councils/Commissions and the Federal Geographic Data Committee [fgdc.gov]
These collaboratives contain GIS data from their member city, county and special district governments.
The NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REGIONAL COUNCILS [narc.org] maintains a directory [narc.org] of these regional councils of government. Here are a few examples from my neck of the woods: