chris@hobbit.gandalf.ca (Chris Sullivan) (04/15/91)
Dear X fans: Well here at last is my summary of all the help I received towards finding outline maps in the public domain. What I actually did, however, was buy a copy of Corel Draw which has a lot of maps in ClipArt samples included with it. Thanks for that pointer to Michael Quinn at DigiMap Data Services (104 Charlton Boulevard, North York, Ontario, M2M 1B9, PH 416- 250-8998 FX 416-250-7173. Corel Draw includes pointers to sources of all the ClipArt Samples, one of which I connected with. I bought their package, MapArt, and imported the files (EPS format) into Corel Draw, exported them to TIFF format bitmaps, and from thence I was more or less home free (it would have been much quicker on a Sparc - don't try it on a 286 unless you have lots of time - I used a 386). DigiMap distributes MapInfo, which I went to a GIS trade show and saw, and liked. It's based on XVT technology, and comes bundled with all kinds of vector-based maps. DigiMap also markets separate maps for various formats. Thanks again, everyone. I will send copies of this under separate cover to those who requested it. 1. "GIS for Mac" ****************************************************************************** PC/ARC-INFO, a version (with reduced capabilities) of workstation ARC-INFO, runs on IBM machines. I don't have their address, but you can probably find an ad from them in a current issue of GIS World, PO Box 8090, Ft Collins, CO 80526. GRASS was developed by the US Army Construction Engineering Research Lab, and is Unix based, but has been ported to the Mac. GRASS distribution sites: Concurrent, Mac, and AT&T: ITD SRSC Bldg 1103, Suite 118 Stennis Space Center, MS 39529 Phone: 601/688-2509, Scott Howard Fax: 601/688-2861 SUN, Tektronix, and PC 386: DBA Systems Redwood One Building, 10560 Arrowhead Roa Fairfax, VA 22033 Phone: 703/934-6769, Dave Johnson Fax: 703/385-5870 Concurrent, SUN, and PC 386 European GRASS Center, Buro Nieuwland P.B. 522 6700 AM Wageningen, Netherlands Phone: (011) 31-8370-21711, Jan Wim Ploeg Fax: 31-8370-25046 SCO UNIX 486 Satellite Technologies Group (STG) 9901 E. Valley Ranch Pkwy, Suite 2020 Irving, TX 75063 Phone: 214/506-9980, H. Eric Douthit II Fax: 214/556-2330 There is a high end GIS package called "MapGrafix" that runs on the MAC. It costs about $6000.00 (educational price). It was meant to compete with ARC-INFO but it doesn't seem to be as full featured. One good feature is the fact that you can use any database (unlike ARC-INFO) with it. The program takes some getting used to because it deviates from the standard MAC-USER interface. They will sell you an almost fully functional demo version for about $50.00. It can be obtained from: ComGrafix, INC. 620 E St. Clearwater, FL 34616 ph: 813-443-6807 A GRASS port called MacGrass is available for $900.00 from ITD, Space Remote Sensing Center Building 1103, Suite 118 Stennis Space Center, MS 39529 ph: 601-688-2509 You need a macII with AUX and a big hard disk 200-300meg to run MacGrass. Also need a video terminal attached to the mac. MacGrass is commanded from a video terminal because it takes over the color display for display only. The program is only distributed via apple streaming tape, so you'll need one of those too. If Grass is public domain why the $900.00 fee? You are basically paying for the video driver and customer support. There was a fairly comprehensive listing of these programs in the Newsletter of the Canadian Cartographic Association about nine months or a year ago. If you have the firepower (memory, etc.), MAP II which can be obtained from John Wiley for about $125 is quite nice. For smaller systems (e.g., SE) there are other, monochrome, programs available from academic sources. By all means, spend $125 for MAP II. It offers a full suite of grid-based GIS functions, color support, nice data import/export capabilities, and you can get support from both John Wiley (the software publisher) or Machine Computng Lab., Dept. of Geography, U. of Manitoba (the developer). A monochrome product recently on the market, hinted at by D. Marble, is called macGIS. It is also about $100, will run on all Macs (including on a 400K external drive!), and comes with an interesting 3-D wire-frame modeling program (if your data set has z-coords.). It may be found by contacting David Hulse, Dept. of Landscape Architecture, Univ. of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403. These Mac products each have interesting user-interfaces (somewhat Mac- standard) which _should_ allow for easier access and perhaps better spatial problem-solving by students. I would be very interested to see results of similar GIS-related studies executed using these Mac products versus more traditional PC-MAP, PC Arc/Info products. I expect that the Mac can easily accommodate more sophisticated metaphor-based interfaces in the future, making Mac-based GISs more intuitively like hands-on geographical/spatial analysis, but only time will tell... 2. "National Highway Planning Network" ****************************************************************************** >Bruce Peterson, of the Transportation Planning and Policy Group at the >Oak Ridge National Laboratory, notes that the initial version (1.0) of >the National Highway Planning Network has been released to the National >Energy Software Center for public distribution. > >The NHPN currently contains 380,00 miles of roadway with 45,000 links >and 28,500 nodes. Most links include a digitized chain of points showing >roadway alignment derived from USGS 1:2M DLGs, generally accurate to >approximately 1200 meters. Attribute detail on many roads includes >administrative and functional class, and all roads will indicate sign >route, length, and access control, among other characteristics. > >Inquiries about distribution should be directed to NESC at 312-972-7250. >Technical queries to Bruce at 615-574-4419 or GTO@ORNLSTC on Bitnet. > >Adapted from a notice dated 6/28/90 3. "CIA World Bank II, Austin Code WOrks, UCSD.edu, Census" ****************************************************************************** I have searched far and wide and have come up with a couple sources for U.S. Map data. HANAUMA.STANFORD.EDU (36.51.0.16) has the world map as does the UCSD.EDU Anonymous FTP site. This database is the CIA World Bank II and it contains the data and some source files explaining the format. The World Bank II is Public Domain. Oh yes, I believe it also has the coordinates to some major cities. The data has the land boundaries, rivers, political boundaries, and one other thing I can't remember ;-) The U.S. Map and state lines can also be purchased from Austin Code Works for a small fee. This is also public domain data. At UCSD.edu there is also a mercator projection. One last interesting database is on uunet.uu.net. There is a large Census file. I didn't get it, but it might help somebody out. I read an article in Byte showing that the census has maps of all the roads on CD and this might be one of their files. It might be handy to play with if you don't have the most recent CD of the data yet. 4. "U.S. Highway Database" ****************************************************************************** Subject: Re: [bit.listserv.gis-l] U.S. Highway Database We have some digital files, both on the VAX belonging to the Center for Mapping, and in our own GIS lab. What are you looking for? Any particular data elements, formats, etc.? A lot of our stuff is in the form of ARC/INFO coverages. 5. "mit.edu WorldMap" ****************************************************************************** Quick look produced. charon.mit.edu:pub/WorldMap/README ---------- This is a collection of geographical data providing the raw data for a map of the world. Each file consists of a sequence of line segments. Each line segment has two points: x1 y1 and x2 y2, in that order. For example, the first line of Texas is: -103.0034 36.4802 -102.1604 36.4937 representing a line segment from (x1, y1) = (-103.0034, 36.4802) to the point (x2, y2) = (-102.1604, 36.4937). All information is in longitude (x) and latitude (y), in the range of -179.14 to 190.37 for longitude and 6.25 to 175.51 for latitude. Two main data sets are provided: a world map (world) and a map of the state boundaries of the United States (usa). These are kept in separate directories, usa and world. The usa directory has the following files. For each we also give its size in bytes: 6868 Alabama 7196 Nebraska 5544 Arizona 2484 Nevada 10336 Arkansas 4216 New-Hampshire 18648 California 6936 New-Jersey 2700 Colorado 3204 New-Mexico 3060 Connecticut 16456 New-York 3162 Delaware 25738 North-Carolina 306 District-of-Columbia 3572 North-Dakota 29954 Florida 8092 Ohio 12886 Georgia 9432 Oklahoma 8532 Idaho 8532 Oregon 11730 Illinois 5814 Pennsylvania 8704 Indiana 2210 Rhode-Island 8908 Iowa 10302 South-Carolina 3858 Kansas 5652 South-Dakota 14994 Kentucky 10268 Tennessee 22338 Lousiana 38524 Texas 13532 Maine 2088 Utah 19210 Maryland 4352 Vermont 9622 Massachusetts 24820 Virginia 28152 Michigan 19476 Washington 12920 Minnesota 13940 West-Virginia 12954 Mississippi 13260 Wisconsin 10370 Missouri 2808 Wyoming 8532 Montana The world directory has the following files. 200449 africa 73800 europe.pol 189871 africa.pol 303072 greenland 124230 antarctica 1206384 northamerica 709587 asia 14063 northamerica.pol 112012 asia.pol 38663 pacifica 169617 australia 377405 southamerica 653704 europe 70479 southamerica.pol Each file is the basic information for a continent. The *.pol files contain political boundaries. If you want only natural boundaries, do not use the *.pol files. If you want all political boundaries, you must use both files since most political boundaries are also natural boundaries. These two main data sets were independently constructed. As a result, they do not completely match (or possibly there was considerable continental drift between the the construction of the two of them). I don't know where the original data came from. It has been processed to get it into this form. Although all data has 4 decimal places, I doubt that it is that accurate. Two decimal places is more probably the limit of its accuracy. Please do not use this data to determine missile target coordinates. Obvious sources of improvement: a. label areas b. change segments (of 2 points) to poly-segments (of n points) c. Add cities, rivers 6. "xmap program" ****************************************************************************** There is the xmap program with some maps of some spot in Indiana, USA, but nothing more than that - plus the author's mail address is no longer valid. 7. "CIA again" ****************************************************************************** I've seen a huge file that contained map information on literally the entire world. I believe the information was produced by the CIA in the U.S. --- the compressed file was on the order of 50 MB (big huh?). You might check the decwrl.dec.com machine file wdb2.tar.Z. I can't tell you what format the data is in. Have you found any other information? I would guess that a query to Brian Ried at DEC (again, probably decwrl.dec.com) might uncover some more info. He seems to be the person that produces the UUCP network maps. 8. "info-mac (try art?)" ****************************************************************************** I have 2 maps one of the US, one of the world in X bitmap format that I converted from the Pict format (orignals were MacDraw docs.) I got all of this from sumex-aim.stanford.edu. The application to convert PICT -> X bitmap is (I think) in the directory utils and is called XBitmap. 9. "comp.mail.maps.postscript" ****************************************************************************** There is a newsgroup called comp.mail.maps.postscript or something that posts internet/bitnet maps of various countries in postscript form. It may be a start but I don't think it will have the resolution/detail you're after. 10. "credits" ****************************************************************************** Thanks to the following, and anyone else whose names I forgot or misplaced: (No guarantee as to how current these addresses are.) Tom Wilson, twilson@gandalf.ca James L. Peterson Software Technology Program MCC Austin, Texas james.peterson@mcc.com Karl A. Nyberg karl@grebyn.com Post Office Box 497 Grebyn Corporation Vienna, VA 22183-0497 USA +1-703-281-2194 %% Dru Nelson %% Miami, FL %% Internet: dnelson@mthvax.cs.miami.edu %% Hal Mueller hmueller@cssun.tamu.edu n270ca@tamunix (Bitnet) Graduate Student, Department of Computer Science Research Assistant, Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843 MARBLE@MAPVXA.CFM.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Duane Marble) Mike Gould State University of New York at Buffalo mabbs@hfrd.dsto.oz.au Stephen A. Mabbs Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation -amit codex!abhargava@uunet.uu.net Chris Moore (Touch Communications Limited?) sooner!cwm@Decwrl.dec.com Rob Caplan caplan@cs.stanford.edu 11. "the end" ************************************************************************ regards, Chris Chris Sullivan Tel: 613.723.6500 Systems Architecture Group Ext: 8253 Gandalf Data Limited Fax: 613.226.1717 130 Colonnade Rd. S. Telex: 053.4728 Nepean, Ontario chris@cannibal.gandalf.ca Canada K2E 7M4