Warren Hunting Smith Library: GIS Thematic Data: Getting Started

TOPIC | GIS THEMATIC DATA

Thematic Data

Geographic Information Systems technology allows researchers and other users to compile layers of information into 'themes'. Thematic data layers are information data sets that have a common feature or attribute placed in the same layer of spatial data. This guide is arranged by general spatial themes. This guide is meant to be a starting point for finding spatial data that corresponds to a specific focus of a GIS analysis or map.

Data Science Central Top 20 Open Data Resources
A list of 20 open data sources from governments and agencies around the world.
Directions Magazine Geospatial Data Resources
Crowdsourced list of Geospatial Data sources from GIS Professionals. Curated by the staff at Directions Online Geospatial Magazine.
Various dates, times, scales and formats.
Update schedule: unknown.
Forbes 3000 Data Sources
Various sources categorized by scale and data type.
Google Data Set Search Engine
Dataset Search lets you find datasets wherever they’re hosted, whether it’s a publisher's site, a digital library, or an author's personal web page.
Knoema for Education
Individual, free student license for access to world-wide country statistics and data.
US Census International Database
The U.S. Census Bureau’s International Data Base update provides demographic revisions for 23 countries. Ten of these countries are in sub-Saharan Africa, six are in Europe, and the rest are in the Middle East, North America, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Recommended Resources

Data.Gov
National Atlas US Government Census Data
US Census 2016 American Community Survey (ACS) State and County Dashboard
US Census TIGER Data Products
Application for Extracting and Exploring Analysis Ready Samples (AρρEEARS)
Spatial Data Repository: The DHS Program (USAID/PEPFAR)
From the About: "The Spatial Data Repository provides geographically-linked health and demographic data from The DHS Program and the U.S. Census Bureau for mapping in a geographic information system (GIS)." Data format: Shapefiles and Geodatabase with complete metadata support. All data provided "as is". Licensed under Open Database License (Please site the Spatial Data Repository as source)
CUGIR: Cornell University Geospatial Information
Geospatial data and metadata for New York State, with special emphasis on those natural features relevant to agriculture, ecology, natural resources, and human-environment interactions.