In the United States, topography often means specifically relief, even though the USGS topographic maps record not just elevation contours, but also roads, populated places, structures, land boundaries, and so on.
These topographic data are available in a range of formats depending upon who acquired the data and what product types were delivered. The classes of data types available include: point cloud data, standard digital elevation models (DEMs) and Google Earth imagery files.
These high resolution topographic data are available as point clouds for download. OpenTopography's suite of web-based processing tools are also available to process these data into custom DEMs and visualization.
Topography in a narrow sense involves the recording of relief or terrain, the three-dimensional quality of the surface, and the identification of specific landforms; this is also known as geomorphometry. In modern usage, this involves generation of elevation data in digital form ( DEM ).