[OSGeo-Discuss] Finding Data Sets

[jo at frot.org]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 04:41:53PM -0500, Chris Holmes wrote:
> >committee has a remit to run a public geodata registry / repository;
> >so we ideally *should* be able to offer this kind of answer. 
> >
> Yeah, my thought was that ideally that list would have a bunch of people 
> who are really good at finding GIS data, and when someone asks a 
> question like that if it's not already in the repository they would have 
> good leads on how to hunt it down, and then be able to easily add it to 
> the repository.  But I realize that's not how it's set up now, which was 
> why my answer was unconvincing.

Recently when i run across unusual sets of particularly boundary and
other vector data, I've been noting them down in the CKAN index - 
http:/www.ckan.net/ - at least this provides a way of publically
noting name, url, keywords, that is guaranteed to stay around awhile. 
It has no spatial properties or query but is a place to start. 
http://www.ckan.net/tag/read/geodata

I *have* been working on a CKAN-inspired spatial metadata/search
project for a little while and would love to test out an open source
release on OSGeo's systems but i don't want to talk about it too much yet

Of course there's GeoNetwork, OSGeo's own "metadata catalog" system, I see
they have a new release candidate due out very soon. It raises the bar
somewhat, offering support for OGC and ISO standards which may be
overkill for simple web mapping use cases. The more the merrier
though, and there are plenty of systems resources to run all this stuff
on, what's missing is peoples' time to setup and contribute to a
repository effort that'll make future questions easier to answer
without repeating ourselves :)

cheers,


jo