A guide to finding free maps on Internet

The Boundary Problems web site Selected published articles - 3
Reproduced from *Surveying World, Vol 7 No 6, Sept/Oct 1999, with the kind permission of the Editor and publishers of Surveying World. You may e-mail the Editor* from here.
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It seems that just about anything is available on the worldwide web if you are prepared to spend the time surfing around for it. But if it’s maps you’re after watch out for the copyright notice.

Maps for free!

By Jon Maynard

sst! Want to get some maps for free? I know a place where you can get all the maps you could ever want. Where? On the world wide web.
But GIS users shouldn’t get too excited: there is not much vector mapping available for free. The Digital Chart of the World in ArcInfo export format can be downloaded for free from http://www.map
room.psu.edu/dcw ). The US Tiger files are available free from http://www.esri.com/data/online/tiger/ . You can also get the Global 30 Arc Second Elevation Data Set from http://edcwww.cr.usgs.gov/landdaac/gtopo30/gtop o30.html . Other vector data is hard to find. So for the rest you’ll have to put up with the bitmap images which are presented to your screen.
There are so many websites which offer maps that it’s difficult to know where to begin. One of the best to start from is the site operated by the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection of the University of Texas at Austin on http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/Map_collec tion/Map_collection.html . This site is dedicated to making its map collection accessible to anyone with Internet connections. Its page starts with a list of ‘maps of special interest’, which in early August listed Taiwan Strait (a 1:4,000,000 map of China), Kashmir and Kosovo. So if you want to look up a place which you have just seen reported on the TV news, this is the site to find the map of it. But be warned, the maps are all large images which take a while to download. You can download shareware viewing software so as to view the maps off-line. You can also print the maps (because they are all copyright-free - which means that some of them are fairly old), but you may have difficulty re-sizing them to fit your printer’s paper format.

e-commerce environment. In other words, visit the site to look at the maps / images and to order them; on-line ordering of course. An example of this is Microsoft’s Terraserver, selling space imagery at http://www.terraserver.com . At this site you can input a place name in the hope that Terraserver will have a satellite image for it. Even if you are lucky enough to find an image of your target you have to be careful over the spelling. I typed in "Sana’a" as the city and "Yemen" as the country, and Ter-raserver couldn’t find it: "Sanaa" is Terraserver’s preferred spelling. Having overcome that hurdle, I was rewarded with a 16m resolution black and white image, which I could zoom to obtain a 1.5m resolution view. There was also a link to the Expe-dia website to obtain an equivalent street map - but then Expedia has only small scale maps of Yemen and not street maps. There are too many other retail web sites to list here - you’ll find many of them on the links lists at utexas and the Bodleian.

Driving the web
Expedia, at http://www.expediamaps.com , rep-resents a third genre of map-serving websites. This genre serves location mapping for free - that’s free to the end user - the site is supported by the rev-enue which pays for all of the advertising you see on the page. Expedia will show you a small scale map of any place name in the world which is big enough to appear on the map. It will also look up addresses (US only) and calculate driving instruc-tions for you (North America only).
Mapquest, at http://www.mapquest.com/ , offers a similar service, and does offer driving directions in Europe, provided that you know the postcodes of both terminals of your journey. Multi Media Map-ping, at http://www.multimap.com , offers interac-tive mapping of all of UK at street level. I zoomed

	The other useful aspect of the utexas site is its long list of links to other map-serving sites. But not all of these offer free mapping. Another site with a particularly comprehen-sive list of links is that of the Bodleian Library, http://www.rsl.ox.ac.uk/nnj/map case.htm . The Bodleian offers a level of sophistication beyond utexas in that it offers galleries of "thumb-nails" of the maps on view: click on a thumbnail to see a larger view of the map which interests you. These university libraries represent one genre of map-serving web site. Those of you with an academic interest in maps will find many other university sites via the links mentioned above.	in, in stages, from an outline of UK to its large scale limit of a 10,000 scale map. It was only at this largest scale that street level mapping kicked in. Multimap does not offer routeing instructions. Search me A fourth genre of map-serving websites includes the search engines which, when they have found whatever you are seeking, offer you a map so that you can find its geographic location. So you could look for a map shop at http://www.yell.co.uk , the website of Yellow Pages. You have to be careful over the spelling of your request; after several attempts I entered a search for "Maps & Charts in United Kingdom". I was able to request a location map for most of the map-dealing premises which the search returned. In this case the source of the location map on the web page is Etak. You might instead try Scoot (the Thomson Directory-based website http://www.scoot.co.uk/ )

A map of Estonia, from the University of Texas' web site, data provided by the US Central Intelligence Agency	E-commerce A second genre comprises the many sites carrying maps and space imagery as a shop window in an	to find a local dentist, doctor or driving instructor. But be careful again over data categories: "Land Surveyors" is unrecognised, but you can type " Sur veyors" and then respond to the various sub-cate-

Surveying World September/October 1999	33

Above:
Near real-time seismic map drawing on data from US Geological Survey; National Earthquake Information Service and other Council of National Seismic System (CNSS) members.

Below: a variety of mapping drawn from ESRI's web site.

gories presented to you, one of which is "Surveyors Land & Hydrographic" (Geomatics hasn’t caught on yet with Scoot). Whatever you look up, you will be offered a location map. The map is served not by Scoot, but by Multimap (see above) and contains Ordnance Survey mapping.
There are some more specific search engines which offer a similar service. For example, if you want to know where the latest Hollywood block-buster is playing you might consult http://www.vir gin.net/cinema/filmfinder/index.html. ) Here you will find out what is playing where and when. There are contact details for individual cinemas, and even a location map in case you have never been to that cinema before. The mapping is again served by Multimap.

Home site home
Looking for a new house? Try, amongst others, http://www.propertyfinder.co.uk, ) the site of Inter-net Property Finder. This company has signed up a long list of estate agents who place their properties on the ‘propertyfinder’ search engine. Thus you can search for a house of a given type (detached, ter-raced, bungalow, etc) in a specified price range and geographic area. You will be presented with a selection of properties. You click on the ones for which you want more details in order to pull up the estate agent’s particulars. Then you are offered a location map for the property, again served by Mul-timap. Interestingly, you might have tried searching the websites of individual estate agents and found

the web which you can download onto your own computer for free (actually for the cost to you of the telephone connection time) but the copyright in these images ( maps or anything else you might find) usually belongs to someone else. So don’t make anything more than private use of them. If you want to publish them, or use them in reports, then contact the copyright owner. This may not always be easy. For example, the copyright note attached to Expedia’s maps economically refers to "Microsoft and its suppliers". You may have to undertake a relay to find the copyright owner.
So why not get on the Internet and go exploring? It’s a map-lover’s paradise out there. And it’s for free - if you keep your discoveries strictly for personal use.

Jon Maynard is a Surveying World Editorial Board Member and works for Ordnance Survey.

Below:
A map of China from the University of Texas' web site.

Projected hurricane impact locations for Florida.	exactly the same properties, but you would still be using the propertyfinder search engine and the Multimap server. This just goes to show that you never know where you have gone to when you surf the web. At the OS With my background I cannot avoid men-tioning the Ordnance Survey website, http://www.ordsvy.gov.uk. ) It doesn’t fit very well into any of the four genres above. It appears to function principally as a cyber fact-sheet and catalogue, but it does show

One of Newsweek's socio-economic maps. An example of a flood risk map.	examples of its products and offers a long list of the many places from which to buy them. There is a wealth of technical information on the site, and some freebies. You can actually download a small scale raster outline map and a corresponding local authority boundary map completely free of charge from this site. You can also download free samples of the digital maps, as well as a free copy of Osview with which to view them. Cartesia, the OS interactive catalogue, is downloadable free as well. The Ordnance Survey website now offers to ‘Get-a-map’ for you: this produces 1:250,000-based images which you can zoom and pan to your con-venience. You can even incorporate up to ten Get-a-map images into your own website free of charge subject to certain conditions. Get-a-map is served to you on the OS web page but comes not from OS but from another website - Multimap. Another useful piece of information you can find is the OS guidance on copyright (the Bodleian takes copyright sufficiently seriously to place its copyright terms very prominently at the start of its site). And here is a final word of warning. You can find lots and lots of images on	Below: a Tiger file showing data layers for San Francisco, California, using data prvided by the US Bureau of Census 1995. From the ESRI web site.

	34	Surveying World September/October 1999

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