Just found the motherload of US location data.
 

The US government has once again provided me with to be honest more data than I can use.

http://geonames.usgs.gov/


here is a summary of what it contains.
http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnispub...48656921988667

To give you an example of just how many data points there are, Arizona alone has 38,777 (Excel could only load one state)

Many things that people have asked about before are contained here. Wells, cemeteries, reservoirs, hospitals, schools, airports, ports, radio/tv transmission towers, mines(unfortunately without product), water springs, railroad stations, campgrounds, museums, cities. This is in addition to geological features.

If I can figure out how to make all this searchable I will add it to my maps. As you move across my map it will show you the closest items to the current location. I may have to build this data its own server to allow rapid searching.

Since my data is not going to be useful for a little while I wanted to ge the raw data out there in case it wold be useful to anyone.

In a word - wow.

Alot of the info is also available on Google Earth.

I have imported 6.9 million data points internationally for use in my newest interactive map. Most of them are cities rivers, mountains, etc, but there are quite a few interesting man made facilities and structures.

They are classified by the following codes

http://www.geonames.org/export/codes.html

Can you guys look over the codes and make suggestions about which ones might be most useful. I am going to pare down the data a bit and I don't want to throw away data which some here might consider useful.

My favorite classification so far
TNKD
cattle dipping tank
a small artificial pond used for immersing cattle in chemically treated water for disease control. There are 153 of them in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

There are also 3 whaling stations, 80 solar salt evaporation ponds and 199 barracks listed worldwide. This database is obviously missing quite a bit of data but is certainly an interesting starting point.

Truly awesome. Thanks.

Imagine if this had existed in such a readily-accessible form when GDW was designing Twilight: 2000. Module designing would have been a true delight, although I think I'd have tended to get stuck in "Check this out!" mode.

Webstral