Cartography on the Web

Map Servers [Maps] [Software] [Photos]

Google Maps
This is my default mapping program, with an amazingly fast user interface which lets you drag the map with your mouse.
Here is where I work.
U.S. Geological Survey
The USGS covers many topics in geology, mapping, and water resources.
The National Map is an interactive display of the entire country as a topographic map, with variable overlays.
Maps are accessible through the Digital Elevation Map index
The University of New Hampshire has 1903 USGS maps of New England on line.
The University of Iowa serves 1:24000 and 1:100000 maps of Iowa.

TopoZone has adjustable-scale USGS topographic maps for the entire United States online.

Map Machine
An interactive online atlas based on the National Geographic Society Atlas of the World.

Earth Maps(tm)
DeLorme Mapping provides street-level maps and trip routing for any location in the US, with a simple interface and faster response time than their competitors.

Harvard Geospatial Library
This interactive map is most useful for its ability to posion place names from its 7-million-entry gazeteer, anywhere in the world. There are other databases and multiple base maps to explore, too.

MapQuest
Includes an interactive atlas and Java mapping applets.
And they now do contourmaps!

MapBlast!
Microsoft Maps & Directions will generate a map for any place in the U.S. given a street address.

Maptech Mapserver
Topo maps and aerial photos by place, zip, or position.

MassGIS serves a variety of basemaps of Massachusetts with lots of interesting overlays.

Iowa Geographic Image Map Server
Orthophoto, shaded relief, topographic, and land cover maps for the state of Iowa at the highest resolution available.

Texas County Maps
The University of Texas Department of Geography and its library system are helping the Texas Department of Transportation get their county maps online. They have a good start, but a long ways to go. These maps have ALL roads labelled and serve as a good example for other, smaller states to emulate. Arizona State University Map links

TIGER Map Service
The goal of this service is to provide a public resource for generating high-quality, detailed maps of anywhere in the United States, using public geographic data.

World of Maps
Maps and travel guide books for destinations around the world in an on-line catalog

U.S. National Park Service Digital Maps
Detailed color maps of most sites of the National Park system in JPEG, PDF, and Adobe Illustrator format.

1895 U.S. Atlas
Very big JPEGs of the entire United States in 1895, county by county, state by state, with railroads and most towns. It would be nice if more compressed versions were available.

Aerial and Space Photography [Maps] [Servers] [Software]

Astronaut Photography of the Earth
Access to all photographs of the earth taken by American astronauts since 1961 through a multi-level clickable map search.

OpenMap Open source JavaBeans for viewing and manipulating geospatial information from BBN Technology.

MIT/MassGIS Digital Orthophoto Project
Graphical access to aerial photographs of the Boston area at varying scales.

Microsoft Terraserver
Not maps but USGS or SOVINFORMSPUTNIK images of some of the earth, searchable by place name or mouse.

Keyhole: "The Ultimate Interface to the Planet"
This program, for Windows only, interfaces over the web with a database of aerial photographs. You can zoom from the whole planet Earth to street level, and even deeper over some cities. Google bought the company in October of 2004 and reduced the price of the consumer version to $29.95. There are some interesting demos on their web site. Images are updated as new coverage becomes available.

Maps [Servers] [Software] [Photos]

Great Globe Gallery
Hundreds of globe images and world maps.

Harvard Map Collection
The Harvard Map Collection is one of the largest and oldest collections of cartographic materials in the United States.
Harvard Links tro Interactive Mapping Sites
The Harvard Map Collection keeps up to date with this great list of links to online interactive maps.

Maps of Specific Locations

Mapping Boston
A great collection of maps of Boston over 4 centuries, exhibited in 1999 at the Boston Public Library and the New England Acquarium and collected in a book.

Peacock Maps
Great wall maps of the Internet from its inception to the present time.

Software [Maps] [Servers] [Photos]

GMT - The Generic Mapping Tools
GMT is a free, open source collection of ~60 UNIX tools that allow users to manipulate (x,y) and (x,y,z) data sets (including filtering, trend fitting, gridding, projecting, etc.) and produce Encapsulated PostScript File (EPS) illustrations ranging from simple x-y plots through contour maps to artificially illuminated surfaces and 3-D perspective views in black and white, gray tone, hachure patterns, and 24-bit color. GMT supports 25 common map projections plus linear, log, and power scaling, and comes with support data such as coastlines, rivers, and political boundaries.

MapServer
MapServer is an OpenSource development environment for building spatially enabled Internet applications. The software builds upon other popular OpenSource or freeware systems like Shapelib, FreeType, Proj.4, GDAL/OGR and others.

GRASS
GRASS GIS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) is an open source Geographical Information System (GIS) with raster, topological vector, image processing, and graphics production functionality that operates on various platforms through a graphical user interface and shell in X-Windows. It is released under GNU General Public License (GPL). Documentation is available through the GRASS Documentation Project (GDP).

GeoTIFF
A TIFF based interchange format for georeferenced raster imagery.

JPL Cartographic Applications Group
The JPL Cartographic Applications Group is involved with many projects involving digital cartography, Geographic Information Systems, Digital Elevation Models, Terrain Analysis and Remote Sensing.

U.S. Geological Survey
The USGS covers many topics in geology, mapping, and water resources. They have pointers to a lot of cartographic software.

DeLorme Mapping
Creators of Street Atlas and Eartha software. Their CyberAtlas produces online maps using the Street Atlas database.

USAPhotoMaps
This program and its ancillary utilities are Microsoft Windows freeware. They were written in C by Doug Cox, a retired airline pilot and download aerial photo and topo map data from Microsoft's free TerraServer Web site, save it on your hard drive, and create seamless maps from it.

vhclmaps map viewers
Free map viewers for world maps, U.S. maps, and terrain maps.

ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute)
Developers of the ArcInfo GIS system. They now sell quite a variety of GIS software for PCs.


Last updated 22 November 2011 by Jessica Mink