Middle East & Caucasus

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General data sources

• LeadDog Consulting licenses commercial data for the Middle East; EastView does as well.
• For countries within the Russian sphere of interest, there are historical Soviet military maps, available individually commercially (inexpensive) from mapstor.com
  • e.g. Armenia (Hayastan), Azerbaijan (Azärbaycan), Georgia (Sakartvelo), Jordan (Al Urdun), Kuwait, Qatar

Countries

• Iran
  • Orthocoverage Downloads includes a free sample of good data (15m greyscale image, 15m elevation) for several small areas in Iran
• Iraq
  •  LeadDog claims to provides the only Iraq GIS maps in the world (commercial licensing)
• Israel
  • a nice cloud-free image of the whole region (ungeoreferenced) is the Space Shuttle snapshot STS41G-120-0056
  • no data of any kind is likely to be made available by the Israeli government, which has, for example, lobbied strongly to ban the sale of satellite images of its own territory [reference]
  • GeoSim Systems created a model of a part of Ramat Gan, an area of Tel Aviv, although it's unknown who own the resulting model
  • East View Geospatial updated their Israel offerings in Dec. 2003; it now includes 30m DEM for the whole country for $80/quad or $3200 for the whole country
• Lebanon
  • Margaret Horne of the Northumbria University School of the Built Environment along with Insite Environments, UK worked on a visualization of Martyr’s Square, Beirut.  See pdf presentation, January 2005
• Saudi Arabia
  • report from a recipient: "We have elevation data for a small part of the area (currently zone1 which allows land development with public utilities provided by the government). Other layers are also available for some parts of the region which are not concentric or matching exactly (these were developed by different agencies). Most of the information is public,  or semi public, but some are privately owned by a consulting group who actually acquired the data through public avenues (very ironic indeed). Almost all of the data is semi government organizations. Some data is commercial but is not reliable (could not be transported) or geodetically coordinated."
• Syria
  • the Virtual Heritage Lab of CNR-ITABC has built interactive virtual models of an archaeological site of Urkesh (Tell Mozan), Syria
• Turkey
  • reportedly, DTED 1 elevation exists for Turkey
    • better quality is not available to civilians (this is a restriction on DEMs which is actually set in law)
  • according to geomorphologist Dr. Kenan Tüfekçi, "In Turkey, General Commander of Mapping (Ankara) prepares the digitized contour map. You can buy this type map from there. In case, you have the necessary software for extracting the DTM. When I need a DEM, I am preparing from the topo map (If interested area is small)."
  • BasarSoft (Başar Bilgisayar Sistemlerine Hoşgeldiniz) is the leading commercial data supplier in Turkey, a partner of MapInfo
  • the Turkish software CitySurf includes nice demonstration data (including roads, buildings, imagery and points of interest) for a part of Istanbul; their newer demo has Izmir