[OpenLayers-Users] GIS Map Data

[Obe, Regina]

Feng,
If you are in the US, census.gov has a ton of data for boundaries and
states.
 
The tiger data set of data is the most popular --
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2007/tgrshp2007.html
and is free and contains boundaries, hydrology, landmarks etc for all
counties/states in US.
 
Canada has a similar source for their road networks, hydrology and
boundaries and I think a lot of those are free too
 - http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/geo/index-eng.cfm
<http://geodepot.statcan.ca/Diss2006/DataProducts/RNF2006_e.jsp> 
 
All the above have their data in ESRI Shape which is pretty much a
defacto standard of transport in GIS work so for sophisticated queries
you'll
want to load these up in something like PostGIS or you can keep them
raw.  Either way you'll want to put a web mapping server behind them
such as MapServer or GeoServer or FeatureServer, TileCache or a combo of
those depending on what you are trying to do.
 
For just looking at the raw ESRI shapefiles, I would recommend something
like OpenJump,Quantum GIS, uDig, gvSig which are all cross-platform
 
http://openjump.org/wiki/show/HomePage
 
http://www.qgis.org/
 
http://udig.refractions.net/
 
http://www.gvsig.gva.es/
 
(I've found OpenJump and Quantum the easiest to figure out how to use if
you are just getting started). The others have their own advantages but
for more sophisticated stuff.
 
As far as playing around locally.  There is a USB toolkit that
admittedly I haven't had a chance to take for a full-spin but may be
very useful for your case just to experiment and get going.  It has
prepackaged a  lot of the above UMN Mapserver, GeoServer, FeatureServer,
TileCache, Apache, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, MySQL, Quantum, Grass, FW Tools
and I think even some sample data.
 
http://www.archaeogeek.com/blog/portable-gis/
 
As Chris mentioned - good to check out 

http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/geodata
<http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/geodata> 

For more suggestions on sources of data.

Hope that helps,

Regina

 
 
 
 

________________________________

From: users-bounces at openlayers.org [mailto:users-bounces at openlayers.org]
On Behalf Of Feng Wong
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2008 6:56 AM
To: users at openlayers.org
Subject: [OpenLayers-Users] GIS Map Data


Hello all,
I am  a newbie to the mapping application and I need your help. I am
using openlayers and with the help of so many examples and extensive
API, I am progressing very well. But, I have one request regarding data.
I do not know where can I get free global raw data that  can use to run
my application offline; i.e downloading to my local computer and being
able to use it without connecting to the internet. Could you please give
me some pointers to where I can download and use the data locally.
Another question I have is how extensive is this data?  If I can get
countries/states/regional boundaries, that would be sufficient for my
application. Also, if there are any premium data as well, I would like
to get the pointers for their sites.


Thanks again,
Feng



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