TopoZone replacement?

[colden46]

I just went to TopoZone.com this morning and noticed it had been bought by Trails.com and turned into a pay site. I'm quite disappointed by this, since TopoZone was the primary place I went to for viewing online topo maps.

Does anybody have any suggestions for other sites with similar features? Basically all I'm looking for is the ability to search based on USGS place name and then browse the topo maps from there. Some of the other features were nice too (converting between NAD27 and WGS84, converting between Degrees/Minutes/Seconds and UTM, etc) but there are other places I can go for that information.

Thanks in advance!

[Hobbitling]

that is quite sad. I used that a lot.

[wbwells]

Try Here

http://www.nysgis.state.ny.us/gisdata/quads/drg24/

[Bill I.]

There is www.maptech.com.

You can also use the search feature on www.MyTopo.com ...

...which, by the way, now covers Canada. A year too late for me, of course, but still a useful development.

[Moses Atwood]

Wow, that's very disappointing. There's some discussion over here:

http://www.summitpost.org/phpBB2/vie...3bec720fcd7b04

[colden46]

Thanks for the help everybody. I can't get to the Maptech server at the moment; I've used it in the past but I can't remember: do they allow searching by place names like lakes, mountains, etc? I don't see a way to do that on the NYS GIS page either, but maybe I'm just not seeing it. The MyTopo search is great, but the browsing of the topos afterwards kind of leaves something to be desired. I know terraserver has topo maps, but I don't see a place name search. And I know of a place that provides Google Earth topo layers, but again: no place name search (and it's kind of annoying to use the topos in GE anyway).

Anyways, does anybody want to provide some venture capital? Coding this up can be my next project. The scanned map images are all freely available, the USGS place name database is freely available (though that server appears to be non-responsive at the moment too), so all that's left is putting it together. And a hard disk big enough for all the data. It wouldn't exactly be rocket science. You can make checks payable to...

Thanks again folks

[Wldrns]

If you have some time to play around you can check out multiple links here.

[Bill I.]

Anyways, does anybody want to provide some venture capital? Coding this up can be my next project.

How much do you need? I'm thinking "wildrivermaps.com". Has a nice ring, don't you think?

[redhawk]

How much do you need? I'm thinking "wildrivermaps.com". Has a nice ring, don't you think?

Seriously, Tie that in with your books and I think you'll have a winner. Makes a lot of sense.

Hawk

[colden46]

How much do you need? I'm thinking "wildrivermaps.com". Has a nice ring, don't you think?

Well, the searching of the USGS place name data was easy:

http://adirondack-park.net/topo/

Like my banner image?

Right now only New York's place name data is there. It took 20 minutes to load the entire country's data (2 million records) into a database on my dual-core 2.2ghz laptop, but the adirondack-park.net server is only a whopping 400mhz. I've got things to do tonight, so I wasn't about to start loading the whole country now.

It has the same limitations that the old topozone's search had, for example you need to type out "mount" instead of just using "mt". And you only get a choice of "exact match" or "begins with", no "contains".

<gibberish>I'd be happy to change that if someone can tell me how to make an index on a table that will let me do a "contains" search quickly (Postgres or MySQL, your choice). MySQL doesn't appear to support creating an index on the reverse()d string values, maybe Postgres does? I don't really want to make another column with reversed names. I could just try full-text search, which would be fine as long as it's fast enough.</gibberish>

I'm also the proud new owner of 3+ gigabytes of scanned topo maps from NYS GIS. Downloading them was the easy part. I have a feeling the map handing is going to take quite a bit longer than the place name search. I can only imagine how big the rest of the country will be.

Btw, I've only looked at this in Firefox, so if it looks ugly in IE, sorry.

[RickW]

There is USAPhoto, I downloaded the free software, you have to download each quadrant and it takes a while. When you do that you then have it all on your own computer and don't need web access to use it. Now I have one continous map of NY from the Thruway to Canada. Its not perfect but its reasonably good. They have both the photos and the topos.

[Bill I.]

Like my banner image?

It brought a tear to me eye!

[AntlerPerak]

It brought a tear to me eye!

This works, tricky to navigate but it works.

http://store.usgs.gov/locator/?store_url=http://store.usgs.gov/scripts/wgate/zww20502859b4/~flNlc3Npb249UFJEOklHU0tBSENJR1NTQVAwMjowMDAwLjAwMjAuMjcxMjBjOWMuOTA1NyZ*aHR0cF9jb250ZW50X2NoYXJzZXQ9aXNvLTg4NTktMSZ*U3RhdGU9MTMwMTguMDAxLjAzLjA2====?~okcode=SESH

On the top right of the page where it says SEARCH type in the name of the Quad you want. Select USGS MAP NAME in the drop down box titled SEARCH TYPE then click go. It will load up a small map on the left side with those location balloons. Click on the balloon and it will give you a choice of maps to download. You get the whole usgs quad in pdf format.

Now then it is tricky. I put Elizabethtown and it found a map in Ohio. Indian Lake found one someplace else.

It did find Santanoni with no trouble. Here is a something I found that may help. On the left side when the Santanoni balloon came up if you click beside the balloon instead of on it the map shifted and revealed neighboring maps. You could see Kempshall Mt and Ampersand Lake listed on the grid. clicking on those names produces access to those maps. So if you don't happen to know the exact map name or the stupid search can't tell the difference between Elizabethtown NY and Oh you can at least get there.

Hey it's the gvt and it's free what do you expect?

[colden46]

Now then it is tricky. I put Elizabethtown and it found a map in Ohio. Indian Lake found one someplace else.

Yeah, I checked that site out yesterday and noticed the same thing. It's pretty ridiculous -- there are 30 Round Ponds just in New York. That's one of the things that was useful about TopoZone; if I saw somebody mention a lake with a common name, I could go and get a list of all the lakes with that name and try and figure out which one they were talking about. You'd think the USGS would realize there might be duplicate place names out there. But like you said, it is the government.

[colden46]

It brought a tear to me eye!

Now you can click on the search results and see the place in the new Google Maps Terrain interface. Not exactly a topo map, but there are contour lines so it's better than nothing. Figured it would be useful for now, and it gave me a chance to learn how to interact with Google Maps -- I plan to just add the topo maps as another layer option (in addition to Map, Satellite, and Terrain). I like the "click and drag" capability of Google's interface, and it's all freely available.