[Geodata] geotorrents?

[Martin Spott]

Chris Holmes wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 09, 2007 at 12:23:40PM -0500, Chris Holmes wrote:
> >> Hey, so I have my sigma/tiger data (postgis dumps of roads, water, 
> >> landmarks, vmap0 countries and gnis, with geoserver configurations) all 
> >> ready to distribute.  
> > 1. Where should I put them?  
[...]
> The impetus for this email is actually the pain I'm going through to get 
> it to Martin.

I hope things are a bit easier now that 'rsync' is available for use at
'my' server  ;-)

I started hosting/mirroring several datasets for my own use on my
server few years ago at:

  ftp://ftp.uni-duisburg.de/GIS/GISData/

and I consider it as a good idea to move all this stuff off that server
to a general OSGeo repository once such thing is available - and
dependable. In the meantime I'd be happy to host Chris' TIGER dumps
there as well.
I'm running this University of Duisburg FTP service for probably ten
years now and I somehow trust it (even though the server hardware has
changed in the meantime and we had several network outages due to bad
weather ....). Certainly I am in favour to see such a trustworthy
repository getting erected under the OSGeo hood.

Yet I'd like to note that the goals of the Landcover-DB that I'm trying
to build has slightly different goals than just serving as a repository
for files that contain open geodata:
1.) The aim is to have data from many different sources available in a
    unified format - this is already implemented to a certain level;
2.) I'm planning to offer a just-in-time download service via web
    frontend: People define some layers or a class of layers, they
    define a geograhic section by entering lat/lon of two opposing
    rectangle corners and will then be able to download shapefiles (for
    example if someone needs VMap data to build FlightGear Scenery just
    for their own country) - this sould be not too difficult to
    implement;
3.) finally I intend to merge the best data we can get from different
    sources into one global set of landcover data - this will take a
    lot of time to get done ....

Now, before making a detailed plan on how to implement 3.) and not
wanting to reinvent the wheel, I'm attempted to have a closer look at
Chris' converted set of TIGER data.

Cheerio,
	Martin.
-- 
 Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
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