[WikiEN-l] USGS maps are liberated!

[Anthony]

On 8/29/06, cohesion <cohesion at 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