I'm in need of acquiring the coordinates of the outlines of all the water bodies inside a country, with the exception of "Sea" or "Ocean" water. Right now, I'm manually outlining the lakes and rivers but it is not a sustainable solution for the magnitude of the application I'm developing.
Even if I can only obtain the data of Lakes or Rivers, that would be a great start. I'm specifically interested in the countries of Malaysia, Brazil and the Dominican Republic.
My situation brings me to the question of, where does Google obtain its data? Are these data sets available?
Google gets this data usually from TomTom, (former TeleAtlas).
The coordinate polygons of that data is not available, at least not without paying much money.
This data is usually extracted from aerial fotos.
For research projects it might be possible to ask TomTom via your University.
An alternative professional quality source is the product NavStreets from Here (former Nokia).
For free you could try OpenStreetMap. You would get coordinates.
Unfortunateley the OpenStreetMap data is not always clean or closed polygons.
The quality depens much on the country. You can check the countries
first by looking in the web browser: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/57963
Geofabrik.de provides OpenStreetMap data converisons and extractions of specific countries, e.g in pbf and shp file format, you might check this to.
read further here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Waterways
Related
I'm interested in implementing some data visualizations as map layers. But I'm interested in generating data layers only above land area (land cover). A good example would be to plot population density over a coastal city. What is a good approach for this, when it comes to the data source and how to actually display layers with such detailed boundaries?
Technically, so far I'm using Leaflet.js and tiles based on OpenStreetMaps, but the question is not necessary technology specific. Also, I'm not interested in plotting this for the whole planet, but for areas of a few hundreds square kilometers (for e.g. a coastal city).
To better give an idea of what I'm interested in, this Koordinates map is something that is similar to what I'm interested in. However, I need something a bit more detailed on the borders.
Usually you need a desktop or server based GIS such coverage, but not JS to do the processing on the client side.
How you do the mapping (here: linking statistical data and land areas) depends on your data itself. You can load OSM based shape files into QGIS and do some python scripting or using the PostGIS commands to link your data and choose a map style.
Another idea would be http://geocommons.com that allow easy visualization if you upload CSV files.
Depending on your area of interest, you can obtain some highly detailed shapefiles from numerous sources. Especially if the local area provides GIS data to the public (many larger coastal cities do, e.g. New York, London). From there, you can create a GeoJSON text of the geometries (here's a free tool for that). Parsing the JSON is very simple and it's very easy to add it to leaflet maps. You can even get creative and add more keys to each geometry object with the data you want to visualize.
Is there maybe (although i doubt but you never know) some free (or not free) database of all areas in world (or just cities) described with geo polygons.
For example:
Soho, London : [(latitude1, longitude1), (latitude2, longitude2), (latitude3, longitude3) ... ]
I know that openstreetmap has some free stuff but I haven find anything like this.
Any information is helpful!
Thanks,
Ivan
The MapIt Global service may help. For any co-ordinate, it returns the administrative boundaries that cover it. If you have a list of cities you're interested in, you can simply query their service and get the shapes of their boundaries.
Have a look at the GeoNames web site. They have free gazetteer data sets available for world countries, including coordinates for capital cities, towns, parks, airports, business centers, etc. I know you asked for polygons but in my extensive travels across the net I haven't found anything that meets that requirement - not for free anyway.
I'm building a series of infographics using Fusion Tables to show yearly data for countries, each nation represented by a pin on Google's map, the data values visible when you click on the nation's pin. I've got the contemporary values working perfectly, but:
My data goes back 80 years and I'd like to allow users to view historic data for non-existant countries like USSR, East / West Germany, etc.
Are there "archive" world maps that I can use when uploading historic data to Fusion Tables? (eg, world map for 1988, world map for 1934)
If not, I can simply use the contemporary map and select pin locations to approximate the old countries, but it wouldn't look so good. I'm neither sufficiently clever nor able to invest the time to create new world maps - I figure someone must have had this problem before now, but I can't find anything.
Any suggestions gratefully appreciated.
Best,
T.
If you can't find what you need on GeoCommons, this site provides a tutorial for creating your own GIS data sets from map imagery, if you're willing to put the work into it. It requires you to install ArcGIS Explorer (it's free, don't worry). There are numerous sources of historical map imagery that you could use, such as this one for Russia.
I would also back up geocodezip in that using KML is probably the easiest way to get a GIS data set onto a Google map, and a lot of GIS applications (like ArcGIS) support it.
You can overlay older maps on top of the Google Maps tiles. This is probably the easiest way to achieve what you are looking for.
See the overlays documentation
- https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/overlays#GroundOverlays
Examples:
https://google-developers.appspot.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/groundoverlay-simple
Also there is a number of tools to help do this. I just did a simple search for Google Maps Tiles Overlay Generator.
- First one I found: http://www.maptiler.org/
you can use the styling parameters to theme the map to look a little older, probably removing labels for pois, roads etc.
I'm developing an OpenGL application. I need to have a model of planet earth spinning around (with the waters in blue, the land in green). My question is not dealing with the OpenGL / graphics ... but with the data.
Where can I get this data? (Of the boundaries of the various countries). Bonus points if you also know where I can get elevation data for each country.
You can get elevation from SRTM data from NASA. For country boundaries, I would download a shp file from a site like Geocommunity. You then can find one of the many open source shp file parsers to parse the data. Another possiblity for elevation data is DEM data. Here's a discusion on working with DEM data. You can also find tile data from Nasa.
For boundaries you might want to have a look at one of those:
Natural earth
Global Admin Areas
Geonames
I use the downloadable Geonames database for all countries, states, counties and cities in the world, but I wonder if there is a database for streets?
So you could pick: country -> state/department/district -> (county/region) -> city -> street in whatever country you like.
Because when I do a search for a street in Google Maps I can see all the upper levels (country/region/city). Is there a database you could download for MySQL for this?
There has to be a database for this, cause there are always national companies that provide this kind of information. Where did they get it from?
Have you checked out OpenStreetMap? It is free and has a export screen that lets you download the data in XML and other formats.
Those concerned with the accruacy of the OpenStreetMap data may want to read what ITO has to say about OpenStreetMap's data for Haiti.
Enter OpenStreetMap, the wiki map of the world, CrisisMappers and an impromptu community of volunteers who collaborated to produce the most authoritative map of Haiti in existence.
If you have 5 minutes you may want to watch this TED video by Tim Berners-Lee talking about what is being done with OpenStreetMap data.
You're looking for Navteq or Tele Atlas.
They will charge lots of money.
The US Census Bureau provides what they call TIGER files, which might help you out for the US anyway... As far as freely available worldwide data I seriously doubt you're gonna find much, but many governments probably provide something similar to the TIGER files. Good luck.
I think one good solution would be Listreet
Samples seems to contain country, region, city, streets and even elevation with longitude and latitude
Prices are fair and the team behind is responsive