I say Thanks Steve!!!
I have no beefs about paying data vendors for their work in cleaning and/or
reformatting data and if I had to I'd probably do it more often. But that's
the problem, most of what's out there I don't have to have. I often wish I
had a data set to investigate some topic important to me at the moment, do
some exploratory analysis, browse, or to have handy just in case I need it,
but the cost of entry for a look-see is kind of prohibitive.
When I see a dataset within my sphere of interest, either by theme or
geographic region, I like to check it out. The weather type things that
Steve Wallace puts out generally grabs my attention for a look but I could
rarely justify buying it. I'm sure there are some datasets to be found that
I'll be indebted to for the ease of access and price of time of downloading.
One think I have noticed, but haven't checked out how widespread this is,
that struck me the wrong way was a condition acknowledgement of use of
digital data. I can see why, but to clean up some "free" data, resell it at
a relatively high price, and then demand that users include an "add" for
background in a report figure seems a little excessive.
In the end, we are a long way from having too much digital cartographic
data out there so there is plenty of room for govenment supplied data,
generous private individuals, and commerical interests big and small to
develop, translate, and/or repackage away at full tilt!
declan
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