A. A Historical Background

As early as 1890, the US government has been collecting data to map the states of the union in the most accurate ways possible [1]. During the revolutionary war, a good map could have influenced a win or a defeat. Maps were very essential in planning war tactics, drawing lines between states, acknowledging water bodies, rivers, and geographical landscapes. In their book ‘Revolution: Mapping the Road to American Independence’ [۲], Richard Brown and Paul Cohen illustrated how the British monarchy was trying to keep the maps of the US away from the hands of the American revolutionaries. They understood that once the landscape is shared by both sides of the battle, war will be much more difficult to win. Sir Thomas Hyde Page was badly wounded when he was drawing a ‘live’ map during the war (Refer to Figure 1 below). His map, included even the flight of bullets during the war to capture the hottest areas of conflict (think of heat maps with recent mapping technologies) [1]. After independence, detailed maps were put in place for all the states. The maps were needed to outline areas for potential agricultural projects, arid lands, rivers, lakes, and much more. The government published maps of different states in consecutive years, as shown in Figure 2. The importance of geographical information and mapping continued throughout the years. In 1906, President Roosevelt, created the United States Geographic Board [4], to drive and highlight geo-mapping activities at the federal government. Executive order is shown in Figure 3 below.  Another important federal agency (that deals with mapping) is the United States Geological Survey (USGS) [5]. The dataset used in this paper is taken from its public data repository. Not only in the US, but all around the world, Maps are critical to governments, and they serve political, and economical interests in so many forms. The next sub-section introduces the motivation of this paper. Section 2 provides a review of existing methods (and federal geo-variables), Section 3 presents the contribution of this paper G-Fed, and lastly, Section 4 presents experiments, results and conclusions.