[comp.archives] zipcodes, maps, atlases

glen@proexam.UUCP (Glen Brydon) (02/21/89)

I have a personal interest in integrating the various
kinds of databases available for making atlases.
At my company we have a modest attempt at keeping online a simple
file of 5-digit zipcodes.  While I would like to use the zip+4 data,
We currently do not have the space to keep it around.  Perhaps there
is a site out there with such space which could serve as a resource
for others who might need limited parts of such a database.
The same goes for U.S. Geological Survey data.  They will sell tapes
will tons of data, but I only need small portions of that.  I would
like to know if there is a site which could be polled to extract such.

Thanks for any help you can supply,
Glen Brydon (glen@proexam)

[I don't hav anything on zip codes, and here is the best I could do
on maps. I hope this helps. tww]

NM panarea.usc.edu
EN crum@cse.usc.edu (Gary L. Crum) Tue Nov  1 19:42:40 PST 1988
TM PST
TT Archive for "maps"
AD crum@cse.usc.edu (Gary L. Crum)
MA CS Dept SAL-200; University of Southern California; LA, CA 90089-0782
CO ftp;ftp;panarea.usc.edu;128.125.3.54;/pub/map;
IX ftp;README;1;881001;;additional information about the archive
KW maps
DE Intended for geographic information, started with Digital Elevation Model
DE (terrain) data from USGS.  Maps in other formats and even remotely related
DE models of geometrical objects are welcome.

The archive was formerly on tethys.usc.edu, and before that on
wasatch.utah.edu.  I bought a cute little 80M drive ($500) for things
like the archive, so it will probably be stable for at least 4 years
now.  If my solid modeling lab gets a NeXT computer as I expect,
space will not be a problem.  I could keep the archive on 256M
optical platters (not always available), and service requests on
demand.  For the price I paid for the 80M drive the archive could be
(500/50)*(256M) = over 2.5G bytes in capacity, but offline (and much
easier to maintain than magnetic tapes because of access time).

Here is the contents of the README file I put in the archive:

---
Map Archive
README file written Tue Nov  1 19:42:40 PST 1988 by crum@panarea.usc.edu

An Internet archive for maps of geographic-scale maps has been set up,
starting with data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS)
National Cartographic Information Center (NCIC), specifically a map
of terrain in USGS Digital Elevation Model (DEM) format.

The archive is on host panarea.usc.edu [128.125.3.54], in anonymous FTP
directory pub/map.  Gary Crum <crum@cse.usc.edu> is maintainer.

The pub/map directory is writeable by anonymous ftp.  Approximately 50M
bytes are available for the map archive as of this writing.  Send mail
to the maintainer, crum@cse.usc.edu, to update the INDEX file.
A convention is that formats be described in README-format files.
---

Gary