Selected Sites

Geographical Information Systems (GIS)

(from the US Geological Survey) GIS is a computer system capable of assembling, storing, manipulating, and displaying geographically referenced information , i.e. data identified according to their locations. Practitioners also regard the total GIS as including operating personnel and the data that go into the system.

Great Circle Calculator

computes the distance between any two points on earth

Making Maps Easy to Read

summarizes a research project to discover some of the factors that make maps easy to read and to use. It was conducted at University College London, at the Royal College of Art and at the University of Nottingham.

National Wetlands Inventory

from the US Fish and Wildlife Service offers access to maps and progress on this projects.

Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection

from the University of Texas at Austin, holds more than 230,000 maps covering every area of the world.

Project GeoSim

is a joint research project of the Departments of Computer Science and Geography at Virginia Tech to create education modules for introductory geography courses

U.S. Gazateer

is a gateway between the Geographic Name Server at martini.eecs.umich.edu:3000 and the World Wide Web, with links to maps from Xerox. See also MIT Geographical Name Server

US Geographic Names Database

from the Peabody Museum of Natural History (Yale University) includes a searchable index of 1,233,933 records corresponding to the labeled features that can be found on the 1:24,000 scale topographic maps of the US Geological Survey. The information is from a data system developed by the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the U. S. Board on Geographic Names. The National Geographic Names Data Base is the largest of the GNIS databases, containing records on almost two million geographic feature names in the United States: from populated places, schools, reservoirs, and parks, to streams, valleys, springs, and ridges.