SpatialNews Site of the Week - View our Featured WebMapping Site!

Useful Sites - GeoCommunity is now featuring a Daily "Useful Site" in place of the site of the week.

Every week, one website is announced as our "Site Of The Week". In addition to being listed on this page, the site of the week will be announced in our daily electronic News Feed which goes out to over 32,000+ industry professionals world-wide. Congratulations to all of the sites awarded our "Site of The Week" distinction. The GeoCommunity takes pride in selecting only those websites that contain superior content and make a valuable contribution to the on-line geo-spatial (location based) Community. If you would like to nominate a website for a GeoCommunity Link Of The Week award please contact us with the details. Sites awarded our "Link Of The Week" distinction are permitted to display the image above.

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Week of April 29, 2002
Tampa Bay Bathy/Topo/Shoreline Demonstration Project - A key component to producing a Bathy-Topo DEM is the ability to integrate NOAA bathymetry and 3rd party bathymetry that exists in multiple vertical tidal datum's with digital elevation data in Orthometric and Ellipsoidal datum's. A pilot project was done for Tampa Bay using the best available NOAA Bathymetry and USGS digital elevation data. The web site provides a comprehensive discussions on the GIS techniques used to construct a 30m bathy-topo DEM, general and technical information on vertical tidal datum's and some information on hydrodynamic tide modeling and a new tool developed by NGS at NOAA called V-Datum transformation tool.

Week of April 22, 2002
National Land Cover Data from the USGS - Derived from the early to mid-1990s Landsat Thematic Mapper satellite data, the National Land Cover Data (NLCD) is a 21-class land cover classification scheme applied consistently over the United States. The spatial resolution of the data is 30 meters and mapped in the Albers Conic Equal Area projection, NAD 83. The NLCD are provided on a state-by-state basis. The state data sets were cut out from larger "regional" data sets that are mosaics of Landsat TM scenes. At this time, all of the NLCD state files are available for free download as 8-bit binary files and some states are also available on CD-ROM as a Geo-TIFF. At full resolution (30 meters), coverage of the lower 48 states requires approximately 14 gigabytes of data.

Week of April 15, 2002
EarthShots - If you're searching for Satellite imagery then this is a must see. EarthShots, from the USGS, provides a large gallery of imagery depicting environmental change around our planet. Follow the links and you'll be presented with imagery along with detailed explanations of the image sensors used to capture the data and descriptions of the site and associated environmental impact.

Week of April 8, 2002
PlanNet, Maricopa County Planning and Development - PlanNet", the Maricopa County Planning and Development Department's GIS website, features ESRI's ArcIMS Internet Map Server and a heavily customized HTML viewer. The site has spatial data from the Department related to zoning, land use, jurisdictions, and planning. PlanNet also provides for address searches and zoning lookup, extensive map-based hyperlinks, and the ability to link to other Maricopa County GIS internet mapping sites directly from the map viewer. PlanNet has been available on the Maricopa County intranet since October, 2001. The site also features an excellent on-line help system and tutorial!

Week of April 1, 2002
Idevio - Innovative Vector Storage - Idevio is a software company focusing at geographic storing and streaming technology. The main product is the RAVE Geo vector database. A fast, compressed, multi-resolution format for huge geographic vector databases, designed for environments ranging from handheld devices to desktop applications. Use their browser - a thin stand-alone client that runs on windows 2000 and accesses the Vmap0 database from the Idevio server.

Week of March 25, 2002
My Community Our Earth (MyCOE) - In preparation for the World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held September 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa, secondary school, college, and university students worldwide are invited to create projects that use the methods and tools of geography to show how their communities can benefit from sustainable development.

Week of March 12, 2002
LandnetUSA - is designed to locate, define, view, measure and communicate information about 1 billion acres covering the continental usa. It offers a huge collection of maps, aerials and satellite images (over 250,000 maps and images) all in a seamless coverage.

Week of March 1, 2002
YYMAP - This interesting site features a proprietary online mapping technology, providing Web users with the functionality similar to that of a desktop street mapping application, with full interactive capabilities and high-resolution printing. The technology is based on serving the geospatial data in vector form and rendering the image on the client side by means of a lightweight browser extension. Currently support clients running Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000 and XP with MS Internet Explorer 4.0 or later. A version running on Pocket PC 2002 compatible PDAs such as iPAQ is available for alpha testing on a limited basis.

Week of Feb 25, 2002
Geotechnologies Web Mapping - Check out the SVG Digital Chat of the World. According to the developer, they are currently the leaders in the new SVG technology which allows web mapping in an Open Source environment. See SVG Web Mapping in action by following along with the SVG Tour.

Week of Feb 18, 2002
Geographical Portal for Climate Change (GPCC) - The Geographical Portal for Climate Change provides a gateway to geographical information on climate change. The user can search for thousands of geospatial data collections worldwide that are relevant to climate change. The portal relies on the technologies and services developed for the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure, in particular for the GeoConnections Discovery Portal and the on-line National Atlas of Canada.

Week of Feb 11, 2002
City of Houston, TX GIS - The city's GIS page provides a variety of public works related data layers to visitors. Users can query data online or order the data electronically via email or phone.

Week of Feb 4, 2002
SiteLocator - Powered by Autodesk's MapGuide, SiteLocator is a sophisticated and dynamic on-line location facility offering visitors to search and interrogate Spectrasite-Transco's portfolio of towers, roof-tops and development sites, and to upload third party portfolios for real-time comparison and analysis.

Week of Jan 28, 2002
Land In Crisis from NationalGeographic.com - NGS has developed a comprehensive section dedicated to following the events in Afghanistan. The site offers news, community discussion forums, and of course... maps! This site is a must see for those interested in the Geography of Afghanistan and the conflict from a geographic perspective.

Week of Jan 21, 2002
GlobeXplorer's Image Viewer - Move around the Globe with this nifty viewer. Select a popular place or landmark and voila... the Viewer is very fast and provides high resolution imagery for a number of sites or simply just point and click!

Week of Jan 14, 2002
EarthViewer - Developed by Keyhole... Keyhole fuses high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery, elevation data, GPS coordinates, and overlay information about cities and businesses to deliver a streaming, 3D map of the entire globe. Viewing software and a registration is required, however, it's worth it!

Week of Jan 7, 2002
The David Rumsey Collection's new Internet Historical GIS and Visualization Service for the San Francisco Bay Area - Publicly available (free) web mapping GIS site where web browser-based users can interact with historical maps and interactively blend/fade/merge and swipe/overlay these historical data sets with current geospatial data such as DRG's, DOQQ's, DEM's, satellite imagery. Developed with Maplicity products (lightweight desktop GIS-like 100% Java applet client for ArcIMS) from Telemorphic.

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