Thursday, January 14, 2010

ESRI data 9.3

ESRI Data is an annual dataset that comes with ESRI Software. Its distributed in 5 set DVD. The most significant change is StreetMap USA with 2003 TeleAtlas data.

In the World dataset (besides cities, countries, admin lines) we also have Time Zones, UTM Zones, Lat-Long grids. It also has 20GB of elevation and imagery data (majority of this from NASA and NGA's SRTM dataset).

World Elevation Data includes ETOPO2 (2x2 minute elevation) and ETOPO30 (30 Arc Second). Image data includes Landsat imagery for various regions.

There's a lot of US based data too (i.e. StreetMap, Census, Demographics). US data has better scale than the rest ... with better accuracy too.

Using this data complements local datasets but the scales might be too small for areas outside US. Check out World at Night images ... awesome stuff.