MapQuest Atlas, an Interesting Tool with Data from the CIA

MapQuest has launched a rather interesting new tool dubbed MapQuest Atlas. As you've probably guessed, the new website is aimed at students and teachers and wants to be a simple tool for discovering interesting facts and tidbits about the countries and regions of the world.

"[T]oday we are introducing Atlas — an online encyclopedia-like service for educators and students, as well as for the use by the general public. We can’t think of a better home for maps of our world than MapQuest," MapQuest's Michael Polner announced.

"With constantly changing geographical, political, economical, environmental factors, it is only getting harder for most of us to get to know our world. Well, maybe except for the CIA. Which is great since that is where the majority of the data in Atlas comes from!," he added.

MapQuest Atlas is very much the online equivalent of its namesake. It doesn't shower visitors with huge amounts of information, but the essential data is there, presented in a simple and clean interface.

You can get info on specific countries or continents and even the whole world, information about the geography, the governments, the economy, the people and so on.

For the whole world, the info is split into interests like population, climate, religion and others. The information is usually presented in a simplified form, especially apparent in the descriptions on the site, but this is expected due to its intended audience.

The data comes from the CIA World Factbook, a publicly available resource. All of the data can be browsed on the Factbook page, but Atlas does a nice job of rounding it up and presenting it in a nice package.

MapQuest has recently been revamped and AOL's mapping division seems to finally be making some changes and improvements. Whether this is because AOL is preparing it for sale or not, remains to be seen.