Data is the core component of Geographic Information Systems. GIS specialists need updating GIS data for maps making and spatial analysis.

For that, we have prepared a list of highly valuable GIS data sources providing freely available geographic datasets – all ready for loading into a Geographic Information System.

These free GIS data sources provide everything a GIS user needs; such as satellite images, aerial photographs, elevation data, LiDAR data, hydrographic and environmental information, administrative boundaries, roads, population data, and more …

1. OpenStreetMapData

The OpenStreetMap project collects an amazing amount of geodata and makes it available to the world for free. But the raw OpenStreetMap data is hard to use. On OpenStreetMapData web site you’ll find some of that data pre-processed and formatted for easier use.

Pre-processing includes removing or fixing of wrong data and assembling of different parts of the data into a usable whole. The data is formatted into Shapefiles for easy use in the usual GIS applications.

This site provides many datasets in the world scale ready to download like land polygons, Water polygons, Coastlines, Waterbody data and more…

To download free GIS data from OpenStreetMapData, visit this link