[Geodata] Geodata Mission

[Martin Spott]

Jo Walsh wrote:

> [...] The few people
> who have done *a lot* on the systems at telascience - crschmidt,
> MartinSpott - are scratching their own itches. Well, no-one scratches
> other people's itches for free. Would money even help, given we know
> we're building something to give away?

It depends (TM) ....  One answer could be: Hey, I'm working as a
freelancer, show me the job and where to find the money  :-)

In my case, regarding the "Landcover-DB", the issue is certainly a bit
more complex. Sure, I've been starting by "scratching my own itch" and
I'm convinced that this is the beginning of almost _every_ unpaid
job/project.
Well, in fact I was already scratching other people's itches: Folks at
FlightGear were discussing about the origin of Scenery errors and they
were completely unable to tell, if the errors resulted from bad data or
from bad processing. So I stuffed all the landuse data into my database
and added a Mapserver for public viewing ....  I suspect the Mapsever
has almost never been used for the intended purpose  :-)

Scratching other people's itches is not _that_ easy. For example I'd be
happy to extend the given database/Mapserver setup to meet other
people's requirements (given that I find the time to actually work on
this). Just, how do I get to know about other people's itches ? In the
context of this example there were very few requests to add more data
layers or more frontend services to the Landcover-DB. The whole setup
was built with having future extensions in mind and I'd be delighted if
more people could profit from the work I've been putting into this
'service'.

To summarize: How does someone like me manage to find out what people
actually need if they don't explcitly tell us/me ? Do we need sort of a
public broker in order to find out what people would like to see ?

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