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The USGS is amazing. They have incredibly detailed information for the US: elevation (within 10 ft in many places), demographics, geology, and others. They have an amazing geologic map for Big Bend National Park [1] (a very geologically interesting park in southern Texas). Global maps are a lot harder to come by, unfortunately, although I did find a similar geologic map of the Earth as the one for Mars (divided by pieces) at [2].

[1] http://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3142/

[2] http://energy.usgs.gov/OilGas/AssessmentsData/WorldPetroleum...



The USGS really is great. It's one part of my government that I'm very proud of.

Here's a file I found a while back. Not Mars related, but pretty amazing. The national file is a delimited txt file with just about every geographical point of interest in the U.S. I've imported it into a SQL database and now run queries against it when I'm looking for a weekend road trip.

http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/download_data.htm


Which file is it? There seem to be a lot of options on that page.

Would there be a way to query wikipedia for the same type of information, or combine the two sources?


It's "NationalFile_20140601.zip - Download all national features in one .zip file "

I can't think of a way to query wikipedia - not like this allows. Once this file has been imported into sql (I use SQL Server), I run queries like SELECT DISTINCT [feature_type] FROM dbo.nationalFile WHERE [state] = 'California'

This will give me a list of all types of features in California. From there, I'll see something that looks interesting (like "lava field" or "mine") and I'll run another query like SELECT [feature_name], [latitude], [longitude] FROM dbo.nationalFile WHERE [state] = 'California' AND feature_type='lava field'.

This will give me a very clear list list. I can't imagine there would be a way to do this with Wikipedia, or any other online source that doesn't offer an API.


The structured data (such as geodata) in Wikipedia is being migrated to Wikidata, which does offer APIs:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

If you dig, I think you can find RDF dumps of the database.


@capnrefsmmat, wow! thanks! If this were 4chan, my reply would have been simply an image of Doc Brown exclaiming Great Scott. :-)




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