A small-scale map of North America was made using a set of basic map information provided by national atlas programs in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Now the framework raw data that was used to produce this map is available from nationalatlas.gov.
TIGER/Line®Shapefiles are spatial extracts from the Census Bureau's MAF/TIGER database, containing features such as roads, railroads, rivers, as well as legal and statistical geographic areas.
he EPA Geospatial Data Access Project provides downloadable files of these facilities or sites in the following formats: Extensible Markup Language (XML), Keyhole Markup Language (KML), Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) Shapefile, ESRI Geodatabase, and Comma Separated Value (CSV).
mapping and report tool for small area employment statistics). This isn't necessarily great for collecting huge amounts of data to analyze outside this web tool but it does have a lot of detail, and can create interesting maps.