What data for GIS to get for Roads, Rivers and lakes?

[Guest player1]

I see all different types of data and am bewildered by all the choices, I expect to use the data to help in photoreal scenery and will load into Global Mapper.Accurate is best, and I don't mind paying for it if its not free but I just need some direction.Thank you.

[scott967 62]

For the US, I like to start with the USGS DLGs. Get from here:http://edc.usgs.gov/geodata/It helps to download an overlay with all the USGS quads for reference (you might need to google around for this).This can be augmented. NGS / NOAA has some good coastline data.http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/RSD/shoredata/NGS_...ne_Products.htmFor roads worth looking also at the US Census TIGER data.http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/Some other US coastline data can be extracted from NOAA Electronic Navigation Chartshttp://chartmaker.ncd.noaa.gov/mcd/enc/download.htmHowever, the easist to use are the raster formats. The vector data is in a special format that shipboard systems use, but most GIS software can't handle. You can find some shapefile data, but it is a derived product from the actual ENC vectors.All this is US data. About the only free data I've found outside of the US is Canadian:http://www.geobase.ca/geobase/en/For the rest of the world -- no idea. Most seem to have a business model that sells data directly or though privledged vendors.scott s..