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posted by
LaminatorX
on Thursday February 27 2014, @11:03PM
from the All-roads-lead-to-where-now? dept.
from the All-roads-lead-to-where-now? dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes:
"Good news, everyone! A brand-new version of QGIS has been released (changelog). QGIS, a full-featured GPL-licensed GIS program has been under active development for twelve years and is now at version 2.2. Funded by a wide range of organizations, the QGIS project lets users create professional-quality maps that compete well with the output of established proprietary GIS packages like ArcView and MapInfo. Notable features of the program include its support for a wide range of file formats, modular design, map server, web publishing, as well as easy python scripting, and an extensive python plugin library.
For those interested, versions are available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Windows, MacOS X, and Android here."
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(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2014, @12:27AM
Natural Earth [naturalearthdata.com] is a great source of data. It's at a large scale, meaning it isn't detailed enough for, say, a city or neighbourhood map. But, for national or provincial/state scale maps, it's very good.
A very kind fellow has a regularly-updated site with shapefiles (vector data) extrated from Open Street Map; you can get datasets for continents, countries, or provinces, as desired (see here [geofabrik.de]).
There's lots of free, usually government-funded, GIS data out there. For Canada, look for CanVec data (it's the base data set used for national topogrpahic maps), or search on GeoGratis. Many other countries have their own public GIS data on the web, too.
Within QGIS, there is a very useful plugin called 'OpenLayers' which allows you to bring in Google/Yahoo/Bing/OSM maps and satellite imagery as raster layers (as an aside, OpenLayers makes QGIS a better Google Maps reader than Google Maps itself).
And, of course, you can bring in your own GPS data to map places you've been, or trace data based on satellite imagery.
Have fun!