[Geodata] Natural Earth public domain data

[Jo Walsh]

dear Martin, thanks for this and sorry for the response lag - been on 
holiday and at a fun workshop on Geographic Information Retrieval - 
http://www.geo.unizh.ch/~rsp/gir10/

On 08/02/2010 20:05, Martin Spott wrote:
>> At work (edina.ac.uk) we are looking for sources of global vector data
>> that are, crucially, maintained and regularly updated by someone else
>
> Vector data of which sort ? As you know we're building/having our
> repository of seamless land cover vecor data for the FlightGear flight
> simulator (at least this is our 'banner') and we're improving steadily
> from different sources (home grown as well as 3rd party) by replacing
> the basic VMap0 coverage with better data where available.

Okay, specifically looking for sources of shapes for socially named 
things - administrative and social areas, natural features.

Intended for use in this service that I am managing for EDINA, the 
research data centre based at University of Edinburgh:
http://unlock.edina.ac.uk/places.html

This is a gazetteer search service which returns shapes or bounding 
boxes where they are available. The idealised use case for Unlock Places 
is "show me pictures of mills in all towns within a mile of the banks of 
the River Tweed".

Unlock Places started as a project called GeoCrossWalk in 2001, and was 
based entirely on Ordnance Survey data, licensed for research and 
teaching use only.

Since October last year there's an alternate open data backend, which at 
present only has geonames.org data (daily updates). Point data is enough 
for many uses of a gazetteer - such as grounding placenames extracted 
from text. It's enough to know that a place exists, and *roughly* where 
it is. But the containment and scale implicit in polygon data helps move 
that geo-text-extraction to another level.

There's also some useful shape-based queries in the Unlock Places API, 
relations like overlaps, contains, intersects - any spatial query 
operators that PostGIS supports and that users would find, well, useful. 
We'd like to show applications of this in the open data side of the 
service (as well as provide global coverage for research projects in 
Europe and elsewhere)

At the least, the service a simple way to grab shapes directly in KML or 
GeoJSON ("get me all the census wards in this area", etc) without 
needing to download and manipulate them within a GIS.

Large scale / high accuracy is *not* a pressing requirement - this is 
meant for rapid visualisations, quick and dirty statistical analyses, 
georeferencing bits of media.

Unlock provides data access service, but is not a data distribution 
service, if you see what I mean - we don't have the resource to do much 
data munging, refinement, generalisation, packaging work. That's why I'm 
looking to build on what others (like Natural Earth) are already doing - 
so schedules help plan for maintenance cost.

cheers,


jo
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