Contains various map databases on topics including topography, biodiversity, water use, etc. Also contains links to other GIS data sources. A good starting point for searching for GIS data from the United States.
This geographic names data set provides a "mashup" of URLs for official city and county government web sites and city and county location data from the USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS). GNIS data includes incorporated places, census designated areas, unincorporated places, counties, and populated places.
The U.S. Census Grids provide raster data sets that include not only population and housing counts, but a wide variety of socioeconomic characteristics. These gridded data sets transform irregularly shaped census block and block group boundaries into a regular surface – a raster grid – for faster and easier analysis.
S. Ahern, M. Naaman, R. Nair, and J. Yang. JCDL '07: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, page 1-10. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2007)
J. Owens, M. Yuan, M. Wachowicz, V. Kantabutra, E. Jr., D. Ames, and A. Gangemi. National Endowment for the Humanities Workshop Visualizing the Past: Tools and Techniques for Understanding Historical Processes, University of Richmond, Virginia, USA, volume 188 of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, IOS Press, (2009)
L. Stenneth, O. Wolfson, P. Yu, and B. Xu. Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, page 54--63. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2011)
E. Valle, H. Qasim, and I. Celino. Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Pervasive Web Mapping, Geoprocessing and Services (WebMGS 2010), (2010)
A. Frank, and R. Barrera. Design and Implementation of Large Spatial Databases, volume 409 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, (1989)
A. Soheili, V. Kalogeraki, and D. Gunopulos. GIS '05: Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM international workshop on Geographic information systems, page 61--70. New York, NY, USA, ACM Press, (2005)
A. Geronimus, J. Bound, and L. Neidert. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 91 (434):
529--537(June 1996)Investigators of social differentials in health outcomes commonly augment incomplete microdata by appending socioeconomic characteristics of residential areas (such as median income in a zip code) to proxy for individual characteristics. But little empirical attention has been paid to how well this aggregate information serves as a proxy for the individual characteristics of interest. We build on recent work addressing the biases inherent in proxies and consider two health-related examples within a statistical framework that illuminates the nature and sources of biases. Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Maternal and Infant Health Survey are linked to census data. We assess the validity of using the aggregate census information as a proxy for individual information when estimating main effects and when controlling for potential confounding between socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors in measures of general health status and infant mortality. We find a general, but not universal, tendency for aggregate proxies to exaggerate the effects of micro-level variables and to do more poorly than micro-level variables at controlling for confounding. The magnitude and direction of these biases vary across samples, however. Our statistical framework and empirical findings suggest the difficulties in and limits to interpreting proxies derived from aggregate census data as if they were micro-level variables. The statistical framework that we outline for our study of health outcomes should be generally applicable to other situations where researchers have merged aggregate data with microdata samples..
M. Hampe, M. Sester, and L. Harrie. ISPRS Congrese, volume XXXV of International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, page 135-140. Lund University, Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, (2004)
A. Vitol, N. Zhukova, and A. Pankin. Proceedings of the 21th International Conference on Conceptual Structures (ICCS 2013), volume 7735 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, page 266-276. Springer, (2013)