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Re:Geologic Map of Mars by prewett on Thursday July 17, 2014 @09:52AM (#8047488)
The USGS is amazing. They have incredibly detailed information for the US: elevation (within 10 ft in many places), demographics, geology, and others. They have an amazing geologic map for Big Bend National Park [1] (a very geologically interesting park in southern Texas). Global maps are a lot harder to come by, unfortunately, although I did find a similar geologic map of the Earth as the one for Mars (divided by pieces) at [2].

[1] http://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3142/

[2] http://energy.usgs.gov/OilGas/AssessmentsData/WorldPetroleum...

Re:Geologic Map of Mars by daveslash on Thursday July 17, 2014 @02:09PM (#8049153)
The USGS really is great. It's one part of my government that I'm very proud of.

Here's a file I found a while back. Not Mars related, but pretty amazing. The national file is a delimited txt file with just about every geographical point of interest in the U.S. I've imported it into a SQL database and now run queries against it when I'm looking for a weekend road trip.

http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic/download_data.htm

Re:Geologic Map of Mars by mrfusion on Thursday July 17, 2014 @02:34PM (#8049308)
Which file is it? There seem to be a lot of options on that page.

Would there be a way to query wikipedia for the same type of information, or combine the two sources?

Re:Geologic Map of Mars by daveslash on Thursday July 17, 2014 @04:55PM (#8050137)
It's "NationalFile_20140601.zip - Download all national features in one .zip file "

I can't think of a way to query wikipedia - not like this allows. Once this file has been imported into sql (I use SQL Server), I run queries like SELECT DISTINCT [feature_type] FROM dbo.nationalFile WHERE [state] = 'California'

This will give me a list of all types of features in California. From there, I'll see something that looks interesting (like "lava field" or "mine") and I'll run another query like SELECT [feature_name], [latitude], [longitude] FROM dbo.nationalFile WHERE [state] = 'California' AND feature_type='lava field'.

This will give me a very clear list list. I can't imagine there would be a way to do this with Wikipedia, or any other online source that doesn't offer an API.

Re:Geologic Map of Mars by capnrefsmmat on Thursday July 17, 2014 @06:04PM (#8050486)
The structured data (such as geodata) in Wikipedia is being migrated to Wikidata, which does offer APIs:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

If you dig, I think you can find RDF dumps of the database.

Re:Geologic Map of Mars by daveslash on Thursday July 17, 2014 @06:08PM (#8050508)
@capnrefsmmat, wow! thanks! If this were 4chan, my reply would have been simply an image of Doc Brown exclaiming Great Scott. :-)