New working lists of US Federal and State GIS portals

Joseph Elfelt of MappingSupport.com has compiled a very helpful working list of addresses for over 40 federal ArcGIS servers with open MapServer and ImageServer data:

https://mappingsupport.com/p/surf_gis/list-federal-GIS-servers.pdf

And a list of over 50 state server addresses:

https://mappingsupport.com/p/surf_gis/list-state-GIS-servers.pdf

The lists also contain some key caveats and tips for finding local GIS data as well.  Joseph is open to the community contacting him with additional federal or state servers to add them; his contact information is at the top of the lists.  That these already excellent resources will continue to be updated is very good news.

A section of the very helpful federal and state lists of servers with open MapServer or ImageServer data, compiled by Joseph Elfelt. 

Karen Payne’s list of Geospatial Data Resources

In the past, we have written about Robin Smith’s free geospatial data listing. Dr Karen Payne at the University of Georgia has published a geospatial data list which is also quite useful.  Her list of geodata links is published on Google Spreadsheets and contains over 1,000 links to different portals, data types, and services.  Because it is listed in a spreadsheet, make sure you pay attention to and investigate each of the tabs.  Categories include scales (global, regional, country), thematic (disaster, imagery, physical, conservation), data types (web apps, tabular, live services), and more.   The list’s focus is on freely available data sets used in international humanitarian work, which is Dr Payne’s major concentration in her work.  The challenge with all GIS data listings, as we point out in our book, is the updating and curation of such lists, but Dr Payne is committed to updating this one as is evident in the breadth and scope of the listing and in my conversations with her.

Dr Payne is also working with the United Nations, converting their Common Operational datasets into services; specifically, populated places, admin boundaries, their names and codes.  This effort could prove to be very helpful to all of us in the geospatial technology community.

Part of Dr Karen Payne’s geospatial data listing.