The UK's Arts and Humanities Data Service, a project of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), has recently made available the GIS Guide to Good Practice, the first of a series of Guides to Good Practice. These Guides are intended to "provid[e] the humanities research and teaching communities with practical instruction in applying recognized standards and good practice to the creation and...

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Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are software packages that analyze and classify data for a particular geographical location. This technology has many applications, "from predicting houses in danger of flooding to analysing crime patterns." The GIS Files, operated by Britain's national mapping agency, is a site that gives a good introduction to the basic concepts of GIS. A sequence of seven...

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Researchers at City University of New York and the New York Botanical Garden have developed a digital base map for the Neotropical flora -- a "multifaceted approach to mapping species distributions [that] will facilitate the work of systematists and floristicians." The map -- which represents the first time "a disparate set of high-quality, botanically relevant environmental and geographic data"...

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The University of Arkansas Library offers the Guide to Mostly On-Line and Mostly Free US Geospatial and Attribute Data Web site. The main page contains a list of every state and related links to available geospatial and attribute data. For example, Wisconsin contains over twenty sites from a variety of sources such as the US Geological Survey and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. Besides...

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"NOAA's National Geodetic Survey (NGS) defines and manages a national coordinate system. This network, the National Spatial Reference System, provides the foundation for transportation and communication; mapping and charting; and a multitude of scientific and engineering applications." The NGS Web site contains several helpful resources for researchers and professionals including a monthly...

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Daniel Goodman of the Montana State University Environmental Statistics Group designed the Graphical Locator Home Web site as an aid for acquiring and refining location data and related measures. Visitors will find several helpful geographical resources including a township-range-section converter, UTM converter, and a degrees-minutes-seconds converter. Although the tools do not necessarily cover...

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Over the past several years, more and more big-city police departments have been able to join crime data with sophisticated geographic-information systems to offer a more detailed portrait of crime patterns for the general public's edification. Recently, the Metropolitan Police of London decided to engage in just such an initiative, and this website contains the helpful results of their...

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