Much of the world does not follow the US model of freely providing government created map data. Data may only be available at great cost, or in many countries is not available for security reasons. The rise of cheap and ubiquitous GPS in cell phones, and abundant satellite imagery, means that individuals can create and share map data. Openstreetmap.org serves this function, and is an international effort. They have a web mapping site, and you can download their data.
Openstreet map coverage varies, depending on the whims of whomever did the digitization.
In most cases your choices might well to be using Openstreetmap, or nothing, but you must evaluate the map and decide which layers are usable for a particular region.
The US State Department has worked with OpenStreetMap for humanitarian relief efforts to crowd source mapping after a disaster.
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OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the
whole world. It is made by people like you.
It is crowd sourced, or open source, and is
similar to Wikipedia. Open Street Map has free streets, waterways, railroads, and other layers in shapefile format (and other formats), worldwide. Data viewer (online)
Available coverage varies. Baghdad, Iraq with color coding by the attribute. This disiplay is not smart; all lines are the same width, and colors are in alphabetical order for the category names. |
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OSM data in Normandy, displayed with rules in a database
(OSM_RULES.dbf, present in main MICRODEM directory).
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OpenStreetMap vector data sets have the following layers:
What is included for a particular area varies, as does the completeness of coverage within the area.
OpenStreetMap Features (web wiki)
Using OpenStreetMap in MICRODEM
Last Revision 11/4/2019