GIS database has shapefiles for roads, administrative areas, waterways, other layers

A friend recently sent a link to this Berkeley database of GIS shapefiles for roughly 245 countries, islands, and principal administrative areas. Themes include roads, railways, inland water, elevation, population, and administrative areas.  If you’ve ever hunted for hard to find shapefiles, bookmark the site. We have been creating a number of maps like the one below of contracted providers in the Mbarara region and I’m curious to see how useful this new database will be.

Update: The same friend (thanks tqlo!) sent this link to the GPS Visualizer’s GeoCoder.  It’s a free service currently run through Yahoo that plots submitted street addresses as coordinates.