Free Maps and GIS Data

To download free enhancements to Manifold System, jump to the Free Manifold Stuff page.

These maps are almost all in Manifold System format. Visit the Products page as well for products that work with these free maps .  Don't have Manifold yet? Visit the Manifold.net Online Store and get a copy for only $145. Check out the What's New page for highlights of new releases. 

Detail (left): The incredible, world-wide topological detail of the Digital Chart of the World.  Scene at the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India.  Click on the image for a 1024 x 768 full screen showing Manifold loaded and viewing 505 Megabytes of data at once!

Don't miss the Maps and Data Products page for reasonably priced, high quality maps and data.  Save the hassle of downloading hundreds of megabytes!

manifold.net publishes thousands of megabytes of maps converted to Manifold® format, as well as other GIS data drawn from US Government and other sources.  Some GIS vendors sell this data for many thousands of dollars.   Download  your maps and other data free from this FTP site. We've written Instructions for both novice and expert FTP users.   ESRI and MapInfo users: Manifold reads and writes shapefiles and mif / mid formats too. Cool!   See the Release 4 Highlights page for more on Manifold.  Check out Screen Shots for more cool images, and don't miss the Windows Integration Sanity Test to see if some other GIS (you know who!) is a "living fossil!"

If you do a lot of work with database and GIS information, don't miss Manifold Database Commander visit  the Commander Home page for details on this essential database tool for data transformation and manipulation.  Many of the maps on this page were created in part with the assistance of this tool.

World Time Zones Map

Manifold.net is please to present a new map of world time zones.  This map is being published under the Free Software Foundation's General Public License, the same license used to distribute GNU and Linux.  You may use it as you wish so long as you pass on rights to do likewise to any recipient of the map or of any derived work. See the readme file for more info.

Manifold Eclipse Planner: Total Eclipses until the Year 2020

We are pleased to present the ultimate GIS total eclipse planner: The new eclipse_planner map from manifold.net includes details on all total eclipses until the year 2020, excluding only the 2003 total eclipse in Antarctica. The map includes all named places within or near the umbral path taken from the Digital Chart of the World as well as a world countries base map. The accompanying map illustration shows duration by color code. Note the 2009 eclipse in Asia and western Pacific is a very rare total eclipse that provides over six minutes of totality.  Wow!

These maps were created using data from the totally cool eclipse predictions by eclipse genius Fred Espenak with extensive processing in Manifold Database Commander and Manifold System Release 4.50 to achieve GIS formats.  The download is a 1.9 MB zipfile containing the Manifold format map and an explanatory text file.  This map may be reused in different formats if citation credit is given to Manifold and to Fred.  See the text file for citation requirements.

...Let's see... southern Africa in 2001 and 2002, the Med in 2006, Russia in 2008, southern Japanese islands in 2009, and the South Pacific in 2010.  See you there!

Eclipse Maps and Data for 11 August Total Eclipse

11 August Total Eclipse in Europe - We've had a lot of fun converting NASA eclipse data into spectacular eclipse maps. 11 August 1999 saw the last total eclipse of the Sun that  crossed Western and Central Europe for many decades.   The thumbnails at right show eclipse duration at three High Gothic cathedrals in France using Manifold World with a few selected layers, and also shows a larger view with transportation turned off.  

The image at left shows the umbral path from the beginning of totality off Nova Scotia to the end in the Indian Ocean. (Unprojected)  Data points along the path have been automatically sized by the time of duration.  Where the path is "fatter" the duration is longer.  The green dots in central Europe show the cluster of almanac data points included for selected cities directly in the path of totality.  Background is the world map provided on the Manifold Release 4.50 CD. Read the .txt files accompanying the maps for an eye-opening account of how we used Table View Calculator to convert unfriendly HTML tabular data into cool geographic maps. Download Eclipse Files

NORTAD 1998

The North American Atlas Database (NORTAD) is yet another fine GIS data collection from those cool people at the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS).  It extends the National Transportation Atlas Database with GIS data for Canada and Mexico, including provincial boundaries, highways, ports, railroads and public use airports.  This is the unconverted data set in NTAD format.  The FTP directory includes conversion software and a readme.txt file giving instructions for conversion for use in Manifold.  Visit the Free Manifold Stuff page for your NTAD99 Format Converter for Manifold. Detail (right):  Canadian data from NORTAD 1998.

NTAD 99 Online and NTAD 2000 Online

We've placed the entire contents of the Bureau of Transportation Statistics's NTAD 99 and NTAD 2000 CDs online at our secondary FTP site.  The National Transportation Atlas Database includes lots and lots of cool GIS data, such as 106th Congressional Districts in 1:100,000-scale, National Highway Network, airports and much, much more. See the NTAD 99 CD Contents Page for a quick list of cool files on the NTAD 1999 and NTAD 2000 CDs. 

This is the unconverted data set in NTAD format - it requires the NTAD to Manifold converter:  Download the NTAD 99 to Manifold Converter.   The FTP directory includes conversion software and a readme.txt file giving instructions for conversion for use in Manifold.  Visit the Free Manifold Stuff page for your NTAD99 Format Converter for Manifold.

US Time Zones

Ever try to find a good map of time zones?  This is a sneak preview of one of the many new maps on the Manifold System Release 4.50 CD.   It's a map of continental US time zones, including the two states where Daylight Savings Time is not observed. The map was created by taking US county data encoded with time zone information provided by the US Government, including county splits for the ten counties that are split by time zones.  The thousands of county areas were assembled into complete time zone areas using manifold.net's Topology Factory product (a cool new product that will be released in 1999... stay tuned).    This map has been contributed to the Free World Data Foundation archives by manifold.net.  The illustration at right shows the map in Lambert Conformal Conic projection.

Manifold System CD Maps and Data Files

1:100,000-scale USGS Maps

TIGER/Line® 1995

Case Studies

This is not a "data" page, but an example of how to use data from the Manifold CD and from this download page.  Visit the case studies page for step-by-step examples of using Manifold in real-life business applications.     This is oriented for people who aready have Manifold on their systems, but the examples provide many screen shots and a detailed sequence of "real life" use for everyone. See how to create a custom, local map from a complex TIGER/Line map, find out how Frank's Catering finds all Zip+4 codes within a mile of its locations and more. See the What's New page for cool screen shots. 

Census / TIGER Demographic Data from CIESIN

Defense Mapping Agency Digital Chart of the World (DCW)

Instructions

Go to the Manifold FTP Download Site

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