Summary

In this chapter, we have surveyed a number of sources of freely-available geospatial data. We have learned that:

• OpenStreetMap is a collaborative website where people can create and edit vector maps worldwide.

• TIGER is a service of the US Geological Survey providing geospatial data on streets, railways, rivers, lakes, geographic boundaries, and legal and statistical entities such as school districts and urban regions.

• Natural Earth Data is an excellent source for physical and cultural boundaries in vector format, as well as various raster-format visualizations of the Earth.

• GSHHS is a high-resolution shoreline database containing detailed vector data for shorelines, lakes, and rivers worldwide.

• The World Borders Dataset is a simple vector data source containing country borders and related data for the entire world bundled into one convenient package.

• Landsat provides detailed raster satellite imagery of all land masses on the Earth.

• GLOBE provides medium-resolution digital elevation (DEM...