One great way to get your head around a large government dataset is to view it using Google Earth. I went on a hunt for the most interesting, striking and geography based government data sets currently available in the KML format used by Google Earth. There is a large gallery of tours and layers available from Google Earth's site, including some based on government data - but I wanted to look beyond them.

Here are eleven data sources (in no particular order) that have KML files ready and waiting for you to download. For some of these you will need to read the instructions associated with the KML to understand what you are looking at and what special features are enabled. Some have multiple datasets within a single KML file -- others include animations. Often when you open them in Google Earth they will start out with either a helpful note or a built in graphical key.

• USDA Forest Service: MODIS Active Fire Mapping Program: View fire detection data and incident information
• USGS Earthquake Hazards Program: real-time earthquake data (updated every 5 minutes!), geologic features and virtual tours of historic earthquakes.
• FEMA Flood Hazards: Stay Dry provides basic flood hazard map information from FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer for specific addresses while NFHL (National Flood Hazard Layer) appears to be a more general application that displays flood hazard zones, floodways, base flood elevations, cross sections and coastal transects and much more.
• NASA: Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio: provides various visualization layers including Tectonic Plates Boundaries and African Fires during 2002. Dig through the various categories, there is a lot here.
• Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory OnEarth: multiple options are available for viewing daily updated views of earth from satellites. Very striking!
• gCensus: provides access to data from the 2000 US Census. The site lets you browse for various elements of data and generate a KML file you can then view via Google Earth.
• Air Quality Now: provides current and forcasted air quality conditions for locations across the USA. It is a product of a partnership of multiple US Government agencies.
• National Weather Service: has a full page of KML layers related to all aspects of weather - past, present and predicted.
• National Gallery of Art: Afghanistan Hidden Treasures from the National Museum: visit Aï Khanum, Tillya Tepe, and Begram—that and examine Afghan Treasures
• National Park Service: National Register of Historic Places: provides Google Earth layers per region of the USA that mark historic places.
• District of Columbia Data Catalog: provides a wide range of data about our nations capital. You must supply some simple data to identify yourself before downloading these KML files. This is just a taste of what various regional governments are providing. Give your home state, district or territory's website a look to see if you can find KML data available.

Have a favorite KML formatted government data set I missed? Please share it in the comments. I found many of these by starting in Goggle's US Government Search and searching for Google Earth.

If you're like me, you want to keep track of the presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain. I thought I'd share a few sites that I've bookmarked in order to keep up to the minute. My favorite site is Electoral-vote.com. E-V collects national and state polls and shows a nice map of the current electoral vote count. As new state polls are released, the maps, spreadsheets, tables, graphs, etc. are updated. There's also a comparison for that day in the 2004 presidential race, roll-over stats for how each state voted since 1992, and tracking of Senate and House elections.

Another site of interest is FiveThirtyEight "electoral projections done right." This one has lots of graphs, "tipping point" states, a return on investment index and more. 538 (the # of electors in the electoral college of course :-) ) also tracks governors' races. It's run by Nate Silver, a writer and baseball statistician. You know how crazy baseball fans are for data, so you know that this site is sucking up as much data as they can, chewing it up and serving it up in lots of different ways.

Also check out RealClearPolitics. This one pulls together news, blogs, editorials, polls and electoral maps (although the mapping feature is only for presidential race).

[Thanks David Weinberger/JoHo for the RealClearPolitics tip!]

A map a day keeps the doctor away right? Well now you can browse through history with National Geographic's daily maps site of historical news events and milestones. And they've even got an RSS feed.

Your feed reader getting too full? Thunderbird slowing down because of too many feeds? Then do what I do: tag it to your del.icio.us account with a tag like "daily." Because each tag has an RSS feed, you can simply add the feed to your Firefox toolbar as a live bookmark. Just click on the orange icon ( in your location bar (upper right). That's how I read GOVDOC-L too!

According to a story in Ars Technica, a tax assessor in Kanawha County, West Virginia has filed a lawsuit to stop a company called Seneca Technologies from publishing  tax maps of the whole state of West Virginia online.  The tax assessor is citing a state law that prohibits individuals from copying and redistributing tax maps without the county tax assessor's permission and enables tax assessors to sell paper copies of the maps for  $8 each. She asserts that  the online maps constitute copyright infringement and have caused her to suffer financial damages.
Seneca Technologies has already battled with the state tax department about the project. Seneca got the maps through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.  The state tax department tried to force Seneca to pay $8 for each of the 20,936 TIF images (a total of $167,488) and Seneca sued  to force the agency to comply with its obligations under the FOIA. The Judge ruled in favor of Seneca, noting that the state law requiring payment applied only to paper maps and not digital copies. The tax department was forced to provide the entire collection of maps for a single payment of $20 to compensate it for the total reproduction costs. Seneca then made the maps freely available online so that they could be accessed by the general public on their website (called FOIAmaps). Seneca plans to use indexing technology to create a search system that makes it easy for users to correlate information from the tax maps with other data stored in Seneca's databases.

Secrecy News has made available a PDF of a A U.S. Army Field Manual that explains the rudiments of map reading. Distribution of the manual is restricted, and it has not been approved for public release. Maps and Legends Secrecy News, December 28, 2007.

• MAP READING AND LAND NAVIGATION. FM 3-25.26 January 2005 HEADQUARTERS DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY Washington, DC, 30 August 2006

Did you know that in 2000, 20% of the world's population made less than a dollar a day?  And that in that same year, 66% of Africa earned less than a dollar a day?  These are the kinds of figures that Gapminder illustrates.  Gapminder is a foundation that develops software for visualizing global development data.  Gapminder projects create visualizations of data such as health, income, child mortality, income distribution, and other topics covered in reports from NGOS's like the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), public agencies, and universities.  Visualization is a powerful way to convey the meaning behind data and Gapminder does it well.  Take a look at their 2005 Human Development Trends presentation, for example.   Sure beats the set of pdfs. 

Some stuff for us map junkies:

The World Freedom Atlas uses Flash to mashup data from the Quality of Government Institute with maps. 

GeoRSS is a new standard for encoding location information into RSS feeds.   

You can get prebuilt GeoRSS feeds or build them yourself in ShapeWiki.

Scanning Registries

Map libraries across the country have been scanning maps for many years. Scanned maps are distributed to patrons, printed out for patrons and in recent years, are being posted online as digital collections (all depending on copyright restrictions). Many libraries are working with state agencies to scan large topographic map collections while other libraries scan their rare and unique maps as a measure for preservation as well as access. Map librarians struggle to keep track of who's scanning what and so two professional organizations have created map scanning registries to track major scanning efforts.

ALA Map and Geography Round Table (MAGERT) Map Scanning Registry goals are to:

• Find out what scanning is being planned, in process, or complete for a particular geographic area
• Head off any duplication of effort
• Provide a resource to use for finding a particular digital image
• Provide a resource for reviewing the various technical parameters used in different projects

The Western Association of Map Libraries has established the WAML Scanning Projects Clearinghouse This Clearinghouse is an effort to create a union list of digitization projects. Its goal is to increase knowledge of and accessibility to scanned items and avoid duplication of efforts.

Online Map Collections

Many libraries are creating beautiful digital map collections. These collections often provide full metadata and zoomable/panable images. Collections are often announced at the Map Librarian discussion list Maps-L.

Here are a few examples of some digital map collections online:

• American Geographical Society Library, UW Milwaukee
• Another AGSL, UWM Collection of Wall Maps
• Map Collection at Gettysburg College
• University of Chicago Map Collection
• University of Illinois Library & the University of Illinois Press Historical Maps Online
• University of Utah, J.Willard Marriot Library Sanborn Fire Insurance maps
• University of Tennessee online historic topographic maps
• New York Public Library American Shores: Maps of the Middle Atlantic Region to 1850

Perhaps old news - but a reminder never hurts. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has a current, detailed map of Baghdad available for download or to view online. The map is a special reference map of Baghdad, Iraq, produced as a tool to help NGA public affairs office and other government public affairs offices in their efforts to discuss issues with the media and public that might be related to the area depicted. The map is unclassified and also referred to as a reference graphic. It is suitable for reference use only and should not be used for any other purpose (not for navigation, etc.). Electronic versions of the Baghdad map are available in .JPEG and MrSID formats. NGA is a Department of Defense combat support agency and a member of the National Intelligence Community. The Agency's mission is to provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of our national security. Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., NGA has major facilities in the Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia and St. Louis, Mo., areas with NGA support teams worldwide.

The Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress is the "largest and most comprehensive cartographic collection in the world, numbering over 5.2 million maps, including 80,000 atlases, 6,000 reference works, numerous globes and three-dimensional plastic relief models, and a large number of cartographic materials in other formats, including electronic." Many have been converted to digital form.

The focus of digital Map Collections is Americana and Cartographic Treasures of the Library of Congress. These images were created from maps and atlases and, in general, are restricted to items that are not covered by copyright protection.

Map Collections is organized according to seven major categories.

One of my favorite collections at the LOC Map Collections site is the panoramic map collection. The panoramic map was a popular cartographic form used to depict U.S. and Canadian cities and towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These maps are also known as bird's-eye views, perspective maps, and aero views.

Panoramic maps are nonphotographic representations of cities portrayed as if viewed from above at an oblique angle. Although not generally drawn to scale, they show street patterns, individual buildings, and major landscape features in perspective.

G.Projector - Global Map Projector

Projecting the oblique spheroid known as Earth onto a 2 dimensional surface is one of the major issues addressed by Geographers and Cartographers. Robert B. Schmunk (rschmunk@giss.nasa.gov) at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies at 2880 Broadway New York, NY 10025 USA has created an excellent free resource called G.Projector.

G.Projector is a Java application which allows you to explore a large collection of global map projections. These may then be projected as an GIF, JPG or PNG equirectangular map image. Longitude-lattitude gridlines and continental outlines may be drawn, and the resulting map images may be saved to disk in GIF, PDF, PNG or PS form.

G.Projector requires that your computer have a Java 1.4 virtual machine, or better, installed. It is available to download at the NASA GISS site Click here.

Included at the site is a nice list of projections describing their characteristics. This is a great site for professionals as well as educators. The graphic representation creates a visual that will aid in our understanding of a some what complicated concept.

This is truly an inspiring story. Jared Benedict held 56,000 USGS maps for ransom. that's right, ransom. Benedict purchased the 56,000 public domain maps on CD-ROM from USGS. Then he asked internet denizens to help him recoup his cost of $1600. Once that was met, he sent all of the maps to the Internet Archive for permanent preservation and free access!

Doesn't that just give you tons of ideas for capturing and releasing all sorts of other government information? The Internet Archive better be ready for the steady stream of government documents!