September 19, 2006

Any updates on the Free DRG project?

I'm curious, has anyone heard anything about the progress or plans to make the DRGs freely available via the Internet archive? Recall the plan from few weeks ago where Jared bought the DRG collection from a vendor, collected "donations" from the industry and then told us that the data would be made publicly available in a handy location (I still contend that they already are publicly available) . I've contacted them a couple of times requesting a simple update or any information at all but have not heard a word - although a small mesage on the site states that the data has been delivered. Now, don't get me wrong but won't uploading and indexing thousands of DRG files take considerable effort?? Until them a few free DRG resources can be found here and there's also the fabulous Geospatial Data Gateway - Have you heard anything? Related weblink http://libre.redjar.org/maps/

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I may be wrong. But I was very dubious of this from the start. Didn't pass the smell test in my book.

I still can't believe people sent him money, when, like you and others have said, the DRGS are already out there for free.



KoS

Anonymous said...

Why not just give the guy some time? I'm sure he has to make a living, in addition to putting this together. And, there's nothing like some guy bugging you about when it will be ready - especially one who makes it clear he thinks it's not a good idea.

gletham Communications said...

well, I never said it wasn't a good idea... it's not THE solution but it can't hurt. I do stand by the fact that if you plan on going public and solicitt cash from people for such an effort then maybe follow up a little, that's all. If there was no cash transaction then I could give a crap but since there was some $1600 that changed hands then I'm interested in knowing what's up.

Anonymous said...

Hey... I shot a contact of mine at Internet Archive an email, and they do have the maps on hand (gave me a link too ;) ). The problem they have with the maps, is they dont exactly have a method to put Geodata in their system and have it easily "searchable" or downloadable. I'm hoping our group (The Free Earth Foundation) is going to be able to help them with that soon enough.

gletham Communications said...

cool... thanks for that MAtt.. this is exactly what my concerns have been. IT all sounds fine in theory... get the data, load on a server, make them available. The problem though is that in order for teh data to be useful they need to be made available in some logical system. What I mean is how are people going to locate the quads they need? This is no simple solution as typpically, users have no idea what quad number they need. A solution is to obtain a quad index, or perhaps simply download all the quads from a specific geographic area (like a county or even a whole State). Obviously this will be a challenge. Then there's the matter of providing the metadata as well. The data will likely be zip or tar compressed but that will maybe be a problem when you get a couple of hundred simultaneaous users trying to download an entire folder as what will likely happen initially. Open up an FTP server and users will naturally want to grab all the data they can... this is how things have historically transpired. Maybe the Internet archive will have a solution, however, such a solution in the past has been what many a business models have been based on. I guess the Internet archive folks maybe have loads of time on their hands.

Anonymous said...

"If there was no cash transaction then I could give a crap but since there was some $1600 that changed hands then I'm interested in knowing what's up."
Did you donate some money or are you just bitching in general. Dude lighten up.

gletham Communications said...

"dude", like I said I'm not too worried about this effort and yes as a matter of fact, someone in our company did "donate" some cash to the guy for some of the free data (something I personally wouldn't have done) so yes, I am interested in what's happening as a matter of fact. Am I bitching, not at all, simply curious...

Anonymous said...

James got a response.
http://www.spatiallyadjusted.com/2006/09/19/update-on-drg-on-the-internet-archive/

gletham Communications said...

Thanks to jared over at mapransom for the following update... sounds like the Internet Archive has the data and will be loading shortly... stay tuned.

From Jared:
I am waiting on the Internet Archive to make the data available. They have been very busy with their September 11th archive project. I was given a time frame of about a week before raw data would be available. However, that was unfortunately just a guess not a
guarantee. I've been updating the map ransom page as I get more information.