Mapping Hacks

What to Do if Your Government Is Hoarding Geographic Data #78

Chapter 7, Names and Places

|

397

HACK

Perens purchased the U.S. Census Bureau’s TIGER data set on CD-ROM

and made the data freely available on his FTP site. This prompted the Cen-

sus Bureau to publish all its data for free download over the Web. Now the

U.S. government is running a “one-stop shop” initiative that includes free

data from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency and the U.S. Geologi-

cal Survey (http://www.geodata.gov/). The latter provides the excellent

“seamless” system featured in “Seamless Data Download from the USGS”

[Hack #67].

If you’re in Canada. Your luck is improving! Partly as a result of grassroots

lobbying by GIS industry experts, a government policy study recommended

that “Digital geospatial data that are collected or created by any level of gov-

ernment should be made as readily available electronically to the public as

possible.” Canada now publishes increasing amounts of free data through its

“geoconnections” web site, http://cgdi.gc.ca/english/index.html.

If you’re in Australia or New Zealand. You have ANZLIC (http://www.anzlic.org.

au/), the Spatial Information Council that covers Australia and New Zealand

and publishes metadata standards based on ISO 19115, which in turn is

converging with the OGC standards. Geoscience Australia is at http://www.

ga.gov.au/, and its Australian Spatial Data Directory (ASDD) ...