Prologue:
If you want qualifications or bio information, you can visit my generic online résumé and/or c.v. details: suffice it to say that I am still a bit of a GIS specialist: less so than before, but still a user.
The goal of this page is to provide some useful tools, reference points and resource links for people who use and/or are learning GIS. There is a bit of a Canadian bias at the moment, given my own work and research focus, but I'm fleshing out some of the US material as well, for the benefit of my SAA workshop participants.
This page provides information on GIS data sources for Canadian, American (USA), and international coverages. It also deals with general resource sites, as well as locations for utilities, oceanographic GIS and remote sensing, GPS, educational institutions and online GIS training/courses, discussions of data standards, and GIS job postings.
GIS and geospatial data sources - Canada
The Lakehead University GIS Research Lab server is finally up. It is a token page at the moment, though great plans are afoot for its role as a data repository and internet map server. In addition, the blue server at Lakehead provides GPS base station data for the Thunder Bay area in .ssf format for DGPS post-processing, as well as some general resources.
Land Information Ontario or LIO (pronounced like the lion...) is an internet map server (IMS), providing high resolution online maps to generic users (look in the data warehouse to browse through the maps). You can't download the data, though, other than printing it out as a static picture. At Lakehead we are to become a data repository for LIO, and researchers who need to manipulate the coverages within GIS software offline. We have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with them, approving us for some of the pre-release data.
As Canadian GIS specialists know all too well, free geodata for the great white north are few and far between. So, here is one source of free stuff, although it is hardly high-resolution stuff. Still, it's cheaper than the commercial stuff, and may suit some basic needs, if you are working from the national to provincial to large-regional scale. One to a million is about as good as it gets at the time of this page composition, though, so don't get too excited.
The Canadian National Air Photo Library is a source for this type of remote sensing data, in digital and analogue formats.
Cartographic boundary files are the coverages which correspond to US Census data districts. They can also provide detailed regional and local maps, for more utilitarian purposes. The are available at a variety of scales, from zip-code to congressional districts.
The Canadian Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS) is the federal site where you can find out what satellite data are available country-wide, and how much it costs (the painful part).
GeoGratis is a Canadian federal source of free, online spatial data (remote sensing and GIS). The resolution and coverages are limited in scope and/or extent, but there is useful material here.
When it's not down, the Canadian Topographic Centre is the national source for 1:250K and 1:50K Canadian topographic maps in digital form, as well as other map data. You can place your orders online, too (although again, it does go down a little too regularly for my taste...like right now).
Cheap(er) raster format topographic maps of Canada are available: it is a compromise, but they can be relatively functional for certain tasks. Fugawi and Quo Vadis are high resolution scans of National Topographic Database maps, available at 1:250K and 1:50K scales. NDI are nautical charts, and Cartovision are city maps.
This private site is quirky, and more oriented towards Canada, but it is useful in providing some Cana-data jumping points, specifically for links to online mappage and StatsCan summaries of data. It'll even go a bit into Canadian law and government, if you are so inclined to go into it a bit more, but I generally stick with the geodata stuff.
Statscan postal code conversion files (PCCF's) are available at this site, as part of the data liberation initiative. These are used to relate Canadian census data to the highest spatial resolution Statscan will give folks like us (generally, forward sorting areas or FSA's, which are the first three characters of Canada's six-character postal codes). An alternate site is available for those who aren't coming in from educational ip's.
Sadly, this Canadian census data site is for University of Toronto students only, or those who are friends of same. The rest of us at other universities have to go through the data Liberation Initiative, a source point for StatsCan data to member Canadian universities. Non-members can browse to see what data are not available to them, but your browser needs to have the appropriate DNS tags in order to actually access the data (a fair bit of which must be requested, anyway, being pretty big census files). Otherwise, basic StatsCan data are available at their general site.
GIS workers/researchers in Canada are fairly unanimous in their desire for free, or at least affordable, GIS data. The Canadian Free Geospatial Data Committee have this as their cause, so you can check on their progress from time to time.
Geoconnections is a Canadian organization centred around the promotion and advancement of GIS in the country, encompassing the distribution of geospatial data on the internet, and establishing the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI). It is essentially an interest group, and not a data-provider.
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The United States Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resource Observation System (EROS) is one of my absolute favourite sites. How can you complain about free data at the 1:12K scale? Admittedly, you do have to process the free data from the Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS) format, but that's a small price to pay, imho. Data available for the United States include: 1:250K and 1:24K DEM's (Digital Elevation Models); 1:1.2M, 1:100K and 1:24K DLG's (Digital Line Graphics), along with Land Use Land Cover (LULC) and National Land Cover Data (NLCD). If you cannot process SDTS format files, you pretty much have to go through GLIS below, to obtain the appropriately formatted data.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) Global Land Information System (GLIS) is a source for publicly accessible coverages of the United States. This is primarily the commercial side of things, where you have to pay for material, versus the EROS page. On the plus side, it is quite reasonable in terms of expense, and data can be provided in a format you request/require for your GIS software.
The Lake Tahoe Data Clearinghouse is a good source of USGS demo data, but unless your studies are based in this region, that's pretty much the limit of its utility. However, it does consist of a good variety of the data types that are available in the discipline.
The National Spatial Database Clearinghouse is another section of the large USGS representation online, providing a general outline of what data it deals with and provides. It provides an index of links to specific data sources.
If you are struggling to incorporate the USGS DEM's into ArcView 3.x, this forum at ESRI provides guidelines on the integration of these data into your project.
MERLIN (Maryland Environmental and Land Information Network) is a good example of a state-level data provider service, for general public consumption. It is similar to LIO in that it allows the user to compose maps online, but the data coverages are not provided for download.
NASA's earth observatory is a general-interest level remote-sensing starting point. Nothing too complex, but it can provide some contextual information for remote sensing images generally, and provides some nice eye-candy.
USGS remote sensing data are available, including LandSat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Multi-spectural Scanner (MSS), Advanced very high resolution radar, and declassificed military satellite photographs. This is a catalog of the data available, along with the costs, of course. No freebies here.
The University of Minnesota has a good resource page for worldwide GIS and Remote Sensing data and related issues, like jobs, data definitions, extensions and scripts, and so on. They also, of course, have a section focussed on state data.
The Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis provides a jumping point for assorted interests in the remote sensing area. It is largely focussed around the east-coast of the US, but does have some international interests, too.
For those of you who struggle with state-plane values, this site provides a dictionary of them, so that your projections can be made correctly.
SE Maps and Aerial Photographic Systems has a good selection of (non-georeferenced) satellite and aerial photographs here, along with a selection of raster-maps, for the southeastern US.
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The University of Edinburgh data library is a useful source of information, as well. While it has a national focus, there are international data available, as coverages and general geospatial data, through the large list of links available here.
This is a case study of an archaeological project in Burgundy, France, using remote sensing and GIS extensively. It's a bit dated in parts at this stage, but a good model to examine an application of GIS and remote sensing at a variety of scales in this discipline.
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The Geography Portal is basically an index of links to GIS- and Remote Sensing-related urls. It's big, so you can get a bit lost, but there are good connections here (those not out of date). It is not a one-stop shopping place, but a guidepost to other resources...
Geosnap is a company that does a bit of GIS work, apparently, and provides a limited number of their Avenue scripts for ArcView 3.x online (that you don't necessarily find at the ESRI website).
For those of you who are ArcView 3.x users, the ESRI site has a plentiful resource of public domain scripts and extensions. This library also includes AML codes for ArcInfo.
Safe Software is a company that produces, among other things, the relative babelfish of GIS: translator software that converts between formats. We have got it here at Lakehead GIS lab, and it is a very useful resource.
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The Geography Portal is basically an index of links to GIS- and Remote Sensing-related urls. It's big, so you can get a bit lost, but there are good connections here (those not out of date). It is not a one-stop shopping place, but a guidepost to other resources...
University of Sydney (Australia, not Nova Scotia) has an archaeology page with a GIS and statistical bent. It isn't the most actively updated, but they keep it reasonably current, and they have links to a larger number of other archaeological and GIS resources, both in Australia and worldwide (see their links button). You can also add yourself to a great list of archaeologists of the world...
GISdatadepot is a repository for free geospatial data, among other things - in general it is a good source-point for many things related to GIS, including data, scripts, extensions, jobs, software, and so on. A fairly one-stop attempt to suit all needs, with both a commercial and freebie side.
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Oceanographic GIS and Remote Sensing
The Challenger Society for Marine Science deals in part with oceanographic remote sensing, and this page is a starting point for a variety of such data sources, largely focussed on the surface.
The Ocean Mapping Group, based at the University of New Brunswick, is more inclined to remote sensing of the seabed through assorted sonar techniques.
The Ocean Sciences division of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans deals with the remote sensing, and provides large scale images online. They work with and discuss both surface and subsurface remote sensing. A source page of links to other oceanographic remote sensing sites is available.
The USGS Office of Coast Survey conduction remote sensing and mapping of waterbodies, in addition to providing a wide variety of images, from remote sensing to historical and biological.
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Data downloads for DGPS post-processing of data acquired in the U.S. are available from CORS. Carriers from the ground stations bleed over the border into southern Canada, and so are also useful for this area. In addition, there are also an assortment of ground stations in Canada, although commercial carriers cover the majority of the region. The Thunder Bay ground station is run out of Lakehead University, where data are available for download.
A small but informative site dealing with GPS. The participants generally focus on smaller scale operations, with inexpensive handhelds.
The Handmap store, while a commercial enterprise, is interesting to me because it sells maps for use on palm-computer devices. Being a palm fan, please humour me for inserting this link.
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Well, it's my alma mater, so a plug for McMaster University, and the GIS program therein.
Not so much a plug, but Texas A&M has a good GIS package.
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University of California Santa Barbara (home of the Geographer's Craft, now hosted at the University of Colorado at Boulder) has a good introduction to GIS theory and practice at this web site.
The Center for the Study of Architecture/Archaeology, based at Bryn Mawr, PA, is a more CAD-oriented, but provides some useful texts and models for spatial data treatment and analysis.
It's commercial, costs money, requires that you either have the software and/or extensions or run only the training version of the software, and only represents ESRI, but the online training at ESRI's virtual campus is good.
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The Guide to Good Practice (for GIS, in this case) is produced by the Arts and Humanities Data Service as both an outline to GIS and a series of guidelines as to standard meta-data documentation procedures, with specific notes in relation to the role of such standards for GIS in archaeology (Appendix 2).
The Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) developed by NASA's Earth Observatory System is discussed here. It's definitely for the remote sensing types.
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Cyber-Sierra is a site that contains links to job-lists for spatial-data specialists.
GIS Jobs Clearinghouse is likewise another good job posting and search site.
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