[Geodata] Natural Earth mirror/distribution

[Alex Mandel]

On 12/14/2010 06:05 AM, Markus Neteler wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 6:19 PM, Brian Hamlin <maplabs at light42.com> wrote:
>> Hi All-
>>
>>  At the just-over Where 2.0 OSGeo booth, Mr. Nathan Vaughn Kelso stopped by
>> from the Washington Post. He and others are behind the cartographically
>> lovely Natural Earth data set. The Natural Earth team I think they are
>> pretty happy with the results, and have received critical acclaim...
>>
>>  http://www.naturalearthdata.com/
>>
>>  So Mr. Kelso inquired if and how we, OSGeo would like to host or promote
>> the set... Apparently a minimal set of all vector, plus two basic raster, is
>> around 670 mb.  (the whole set of rasters brings it up to 4-6 GB ?)
>>
>>  seems like a great fit to me... Ideas ?
>>
>>  best regards
>>   -Brian
> 
> The GRASS project is mirrored at ibiblio,org. We just got this offer from
> them which may be interesting here (fwd with permission):
> 
> 
> On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 11:55 PM, John Reuning <john at ibiblio.org> wrote:
> ...
>> I also wanted to open a dialog about using BitTorrent for
>> distribution.  ibiblio has a torrent site that we use for other
>> projects.  http://torrent.ibiblio.org/  One of our goals for the next
>> several months is to add more projects.  The grass software and gis
>> sample data sets look like great candidates.  We have search/browse as
>> well as seeding software designed for server use.  The torrents should
>> never go stale as long as you intend to distribute the content.
>>
>> If you're interested, we'll make the files available and provide you
>> links for your web pages.  In future updates to the web site, we plan
>> to add self-service tools for you to take control over your content.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> -John R.
> 
> 
> cheers
> Markus
> 

That would be interesting, I've also been tinkering with mirror brain
software which redirects users to geographically closer download mirrors
and support optionally torrents and metalink (kinda like DHT torrents).
So I could probably stand up a copy too, need to work out some QoS
throttling 1st to make sure I don't saturate my lab's connections.

If I remember last time I talked with Brian they also mentioned wanted
to find someone to put up a wms/wfs of the dataset. I'll followup with
the openaerialmap team that feverishly loading data at telascience right
now.

Thanks,
Alex