[RndTbl] GIS tutorials and treasure chests (ie free data)

Daryl Fonseca-Holt daryl at prairieturtle.ca
Mon Sep 19 10:26:12 CDT 2005


Shawn Wallbridge fanned the flames of a fire I've had burning for GIS
since working with ArcInfo at the UofM. I've built some of the tools he
mentioned in his presentation at the MUUG (thanks again Shawn!) and
thought I'd share some of the resources I've found.

Having no formal education in geography I've had to bootstrap myself so
these links range from the tutorial to the advanced.

I built qgis and grass 6 and then got my feet wet with the workshop from
the Open Source Geospatial '05 Conference: http://mpa.itc.it/markus/mum3

For an excellent introduction and study of map projections (ie.
Mercator, azimuthal orthographic, etc) see
	http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/CartIndex/cartIndex.html

For training on the geospatial infrastructure available from the
government of Canada see
http://www.geoconnections.org/publications/training_manual/e/


These are links I've been using since I've learned more about what I'm
doing:
   Standards bodies:
	Open Geospatial Consortium http://www.opengeospatial.org/
   Free data sources:
	http://atlas.gc.ca/site/english/dataservices/free_data.html
	http://geography.usgs.gov/products.html#digital_data
	http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/
	http://nationalatlas.gov/pros.html
	http://web2.gov.mb.ca/mli/mli_data/index.html (must register)
	http://www.esri.com/data/download/basemap/index.html
	http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/nationalatlas/
	http://www.geographynetwork.ca/data/freedata.html#


   How did I find all this stuff? It was a twisty path, but it began
with http://www.freegis.org. There I found links to all the software
Shawn mentioned, links to data sources, and then it all cascaded from
there. Just choose English, Deutsch, or French in the upper-right corner.
   Notable for some, but I haven't investigated it yet because Shawn's
Part II will be discussing it, is the mapping servers available. For
now, a teaser is this link that checks the status of all the mapping
servers known to part of the US government:
http://registry.fgdc.gov/serverstatus/
The link can be useful in locating data sources for download, not just
mapping servers, as they include the home page link for each server. So
even if it is down, you may be able to find free data there.

Regards, Daryl



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