MIT's GeoWeb Repository of Data

We came across a small blurb in the MIT news today about the release of “MIT GeoWeb”

“… a new interface to the MIT Geodata Repository, enables users to access Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, once accessible only in ArcGIS, through a standard web browser.”

The MIT GeoWeb provides a Google Maps interface to their extensive repository of geodata in shapefile format. In short you can search the MIT repository of data by geographic region, keyword or browse, then visualize the file that you find on Google Maps in the same browser. If you like what you find you can check out the metadata and/or download the shapefile. While the user interface is not the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen it looks to be effective with has a nice array of data you can browse. The quick visualization of lines, points and polygons is also a very nice feature.

On the downside you can’t click on the data rendered in Google Maps to see the information behind it. You also can’t download the data in a file format other than shapefile, so accessing the data is still restricted to GIS applications. Although the biggest kicker is to access to the application at all you have to be a MIT student or employee. That puts a bit of a damper on the whole thing, but still a clever implementation further pushing the frontier of open data access.

There is a nice screencast of the application here.