My housemate just pointed out to me that Canada is getting up to speed with it’s geographic and remotely sensed imagery data distribution. I’ve known about the really cool maps.gov.bc.ca mapping interface for a while, but that only displays various layers without allowing you to download them and work with them yourself. It’s also only for BC.

(to make maps.gov.bc.ca do it’s cool tricks for you, click for example “air photo inventory”, then once it’s loaded, the “layers” tab, then any of the folders and check the boxes to add on aerial ‘ortho’ photos. There’s also some topographic layers somewhere, if you can find them),

geobase.ca is national and free and gives you the actual GIS and imagery layers for download so you can plug them into your GIS or imagery analysis programs and play with them and work with them and be a blissfull cartogeek. I just made that word up, but that’s not the last time I’ll use it. Cartogeek.

GeoBase doesn’t have the whiz-bang gee-wizz coolery of the USGS’s seamless data extraction site seamless.usgs.gov, and, well, it isn’t as good because of it. You can’t layer and pan dynamically, and you can’t cut out your own chunks of data – you have to take the whole region or nothing. But it still looks really good.

The maps.gov.bc.ca mapping interface and the USGS seamless data tool share one problem that Geobase nicely avoids: if you didn’t know they existed and exactly where to look for them, you would probably never ever find them from their respective homepages. Geobase has got the data extraction interface nicely labelled: “data extraction”, not far from the top, on the left, with a cute data extraction graphic. You wouldn’t think that was such a great leap forward, but man what difference sane webpage layout makes to information availalibility. Sad to think of the extroardinary capabilities of those other sites sitting idle because no one who visits know they exist.

Anyway, as they same on the Geobase.ca page,

GeoBase geospatial data is here: take it, use it, and spread the word!