Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI)

The Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) gives decision-makers access to online location-based information that can help them do their jobs better and more efficiently. Often presented in the form of detail-rich digital maps or satellite images, this geographic information enables decision-makers to spot trends… evaluate options… understand trade-offs… avert risks… assess emergencies… and much more.

GSHHS

GSHHS is a high-resolution shoreline data set amalgamated from two databases in the public domain. The data have undergone extensive processing and are free of internal inconsistencies such as erratic points and crossing segments. The shorelines are constructed entirely from hierarchically arranged closed polygons. The data can be used to simplify data searches and data selections, or to study the statistical characteristics of shorelines and land-masses. It comes with access software and routines to facilitate decimation based on a standard line-reduction algorithm.

Natural Earth

Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.

Natural Earth was built through a collaboration of many volunteers and is supported by NACIS (North American Cartographic Information Society), and is free for use in any type of project (see our Terms of Use page for more information).

License: Public Domain.

OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is a crowd sourced map of the world which has grown to become one of the most detailed sources of local-scale map data available. Source map data is created and maintained by thousands of volunteers from around the world, using processes similar to the maintaining of the wikipedia encyclopedia.

The most visible aspect to OSM is the online web-tile interface from https://www.openstreetmap.org/, but the maps can also be viewed, imported, or edited in many applications such as Quantum GIS, OpenLayers, ArcGIS and dedicated OSM applications.

The heart of the project is the underlying data which is open for all to edit, view, or create custom rendered maps. Fundamentally OSM’s focus is on the data, the rich maps simply fall out of this.　　

License: Creative Commons CC-By-SA
The project description quoted above is licensed by OSGeo under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License。

OSGeo North Carolina, USA Educational dataset

This data set is a comprehensive collection of raster, vector and imagery data covering parts of North Carolina (NC), USA, prepared from public data sources provided by the North Carolina state and local government agencies and Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF).

The data set includes sections of the NC capital city Raleigh and its surroundings.

Data are provided at three hierarchical levels:

• entire NC state with raster data at 500m resolution;
• South-west Wake County with raster data at resolutions 30m-10m; and
• a small watershed in rural area with data resolutions of 1m-3m (see image).

License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)

This  description quoted above is licensed by OSGeo under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License。