Global Administrative Areas (GADM) is a spatial database of the location of the world’s administrative areas. Files are provided as Google Earth KMZ, shapefiles (.shp), ESRI geodatabase and as I was exited to see: as .RData files.
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The Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project released an online map, MetroPhilaMapper which allows to easily map over 300 indicators for the region, including land use patterns, population characteristics, school district spending and performance, income and wage data, and crime patterns.
A discussion about referencing and bringing historical maps into a GIS recently took place on the MapHist Mailing list. The thread on “Historical maps in GIS, accuracy, RMS error” starts here . It ranges from evaluations of different transformation algorithms to the question of why would we want to georeference historical maps at all and includes a pointer to the (free) MapAnalyst software for the accuracy analysis of old maps as well as to e-Perimetron, a Web based journal on History, Cartography, and Maps, which contains publications on geo-referencing historical maps.
