Free Data FAQ
Monday, June 16th, 2008- What are the coverages, scales, source documents, and maintenance associated with the free data? Is it disclosed anywhere on the site?
- Are the data in the right format? Very few sites produce data in a format that gets the most out of Petra, for instance.
- With any data set, it’s important to understand something about the quality of the dataset. This might seem obvious, but much of the time free data is put out on the Internet without accompanying metadata (data about the data).
- Will you have to tile the pieces together?
- How do you update the tiles or data set?
- What coordinate system do the data use? Do you know enough about this subject or this dataset to integrate this data set successfully with other data sets?
- Different organizations produce data for different reasons, and those reasons might not be yours. The Census Bureau, for example, creates lots of data, but they want to count people. They may not care about how many points are added to a stream in rural Utah, for instance, but you might care a lot because of your stream drainage study.
- Just because a data structure has a lot of places for information to go does not mean the structure is actually populated with data! For example, if you’re doing a well study involving bottom hole temperatures, and only
- Whether the data are free or from a vendor, someone has to “know” the process to download it and “own that process”. Should that be an extra job responsibility of yours, to become an amateur IT volunteer?
- If you aren’t the unpaid IT volunteer in your company, then who is? As data sets accumulate, someone will have to manage all that stuff.
Tags: cartography, Data FAQs, free data
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