DATA ... Continued

 Data is Unfortunately  Not free

We live in the wiki generation where we expect a lot of data to be available free of charge.online.
it is true in  many  respects , however Georeferenced data  is firmly ecluded from this wiki stuff.
if you geospatial data you must neccesarily pay for if.
It is true that some countries have free base data available free of charge but that does not extend to the rest of us in the developing world . here most required data is not even available and to talk of having it for free is probably stretching a bit too far.

However as we keep discovering everyday there are some  free downloadable data on specific fields that could be used in some GIS projects.I will list some of the sites  here and if anyone has other places to find free geospatial data on Ghana you can put the link here.

www.geodata.grid.unep.ch

www.gospatial.com

www.earthtrends.wri.org

www.maplibrary.org

www.ungiwg.org

www.opengeospatial.org

swera.unep.net

www.fao.org/geonetwork

www.unosat.org/ungiwg

unosat.web.cern.ch/unosat/ungiwg/

maps.mlst.net/view_maps

maps.mlst.net/

www.unsalb.org

www.continentalshelf.org

www.openstreetmap.org

www.cartographic.com

these sites are mostly UN and other international agencies that collect data for specific pursposes . Some of the dat is very specific to certain techinical fields. however some layers of the data could be used for other purposes. For instance an FAO website may have data on market access with a layer of transportation features. The transportation  layer could be extracted and used  for other purposes.
Some of the data are also from open source sites and institutions that are aiming to make as much data available to users for free as possible.

All the data comes in various formats but shapefiles are the most common
Below is the list of  all the common GIS data  formats
*.aep;*.grd;*.adf;*.e00;*.flt;*.apr;*.shp;*.dxf;*.bt;*.toc;*.rt1;*.dem;*.dlg;*.opt;*
.ecw;*.img;*.gdf;*.gml;*.sid;*.mif;*
.ddf;*.ddf;*.bil;*.tiff;*.tif;*.jpg;*.jpeg;*.ttkps;*.ttkgp;*.ttkls;*.lft;*.pft;*.tft)

Comments and suggestions are  welcomes