On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 01:55:53PM -0400, Derrick J Brashear wrote: > On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Steve Morris wrote: > > > > >Here's an interesting approach to making > >public-domain-but-available-for-fee data widely available for free (in > >this case US-wide DRGs): > > > >http://ransom.redjar.org/ > > He ignores that some states (e.g. PA) have unmodified and complete USGS > data online already. Convenience is good but why buy data which is already > available?
How many hours would it take to find which states publish the data, and which states don't? How much time would it take to download the data, ensure that it is the correct data, ensure that it is complete data, and ensure that it matches the standards of all the data provided for ransom? How much money would actually be saved off the price of $1600 by performing the tasks above? I would guess that once you start breaking it down, you find that to buy each state is more than 1/50th of the price. If it's 25% more to buy each state individually than to buy the whole set as one, Then in order to break even, *assuming your time is free*, you have to find 10 states with the same quality of data that was bought. 1. There probably aren't 10 states which make publicly available the DRGs. 2. If there are, those 10 states may not provide georeferenced versions of the images. 3. If they do, they may not be named in the same way as all the other drgs. Assuming you're looking for an internally consistent set of data, you're probably going to have to spend some amount of time which is non-zero ensuring that quality is met -- and even at starving grad student rates, it only takes 3 hours of work before you've lost any benefit you might have gained. $1600 is a relatively small amount of money when you spread it out over 100 people -- and when you consider the fact that there are probably 10 times that number willing to donate to a cause like this, there's probably no reason *not* to just go ahead and buy the entire set. I think it was the right choice, economically, to get a full set of consistent data, than to try to spend hours on end piecing it together over the web. -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
