On 8/29/06, cohesion cohesion@sleepyhead.org wrote:
Jared Benedict bought all of the USGS maps for $1600 and then had a fund raiser to recoup the money. That has been done and now they are being uploaded to the Internet Archive. Project info is here http://ransom.redjar.org/
Just letting people know, I'm sure there are a lot of cartographers eager to get these into wikipedia :D
Judson
This is awesome. I wonder how long it'll take before someone comes up with a Wikimapia (http://www.wikimapia.org/) that isn't "powered by Google".
I just got my GPS a couple months ago and I'm already starting to get back into the GIS thing. Rather detailed shapefiles for all of the US are available for free at http://www.esri.com/data/download/census2000_tigerline/index.html. I believe these are also exempt from copyright law as US government works.
I believe all that's left stopping people from making a copyright-free google maps would be the intersection/one-way street data. AFAIK the only data that exists for that is proprietary. Maybe it's time to push again for some sort of GIS-based Wikimedia project.
Anthony