I live on Vancouver Island, and enjoy exploring the outdoors of this beautiful location. I'm a tech geek who loves gadgets, and I work at a job which lets me learn about geographic information systems. Combine all of that, and somehow the thought of making digital maps about hiking and biking trails on the island becomes a persistent one. I have a philosophical problem with the concept that mapping information should be protected for commercial purposes. In Canada, the government approach appears to be that all mapping information should be kept under tight restrictions, which is why it has been next to impossible to find freely available digital maps. Recently, however, good coverages of Canadian terrain, geographic names, and the road networks have been made available under an unrestricted license at Geobase . This now opens up the possibility of overlaying layers containing local information without having to re-create the base maps. In the spirit of keeping with the free theme,...
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