James Fee GIS Blog

23 responses so far ↓

• 1 Soxsfan // Aug 27, 2006 at 7:17 pm

  You didn’t just tag this post “stickittotheman” did you James?

• 2 glenn // Aug 27, 2006 at 9:30 pm

  should also be tagged stickittothedatadepot! Nice lead and best of luck to Jared. There actually are tons of free sources of DRGs and other data though but his efforts will also be appreciated… anyone who takes money out of the pockets of the dipshits at the datadepot are OK in my mind… go get em!

• 3 donald // Aug 27, 2006 at 11:08 pm

  James, I was with you until your last paragraph. Suppose Manifold donates money to the noble cause you talk about. Will that make Manifold a better product in your eyes? What was your point?

• 4 KoS // Aug 28, 2006 at 6:06 am

  I don’t get it. There are a few places that I can get the entire US DRGs free.

  So is he just trying to recoup his money?

  Side note, I’m a believer, if it’s public created data, then it should be free to the public. The public already owns and paid for it’s developement. They should also have access to it.

  Unless they like paying for it twice, by buying it through a middle man.

  KoS

• 5 James Fee // Aug 28, 2006 at 6:11 am

  @donald - Just to annoy all you manifold users because you have no sense of humor and because any time somone says anything negative about Manifold you jump up and claim foul.

• 6 James Fee // Aug 28, 2006 at 6:14 am

  guys, as I said there are tons of places you can get free drgs.

  BUT, what Jared is doing is getting it out into the public domain. I have yet to see a free drg download space that is truly “free” in that sense. When Jared is done, we’ll have a recourse, thanks to the Internet Archive, that will always be there.

• 7 Matt Eitrem // Aug 28, 2006 at 6:38 am

  The Terra Server extension is the bomb for freee DRG access any where in the country, in arcmap that is. Manifold users will be SOL.

• 8 KoS // Aug 28, 2006 at 7:08 am

  http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov/

  James, here is a free download site. Well, not totally free since taxes paid for the “pony”.

  KoS

• 9 glenn // Aug 28, 2006 at 8:03 am

  James,
  how are you defining FREE? I’m just confused because you claim that there’s no true, free data repository where the DRGs are housed. You may be correct that there is no freedrg.com website where all are freely available, however, as others have listed here there are the likes of terraserver, the USDA site, and TONS of others where the dRGs are many other datasets are there for the taking. One thing to note is that if Jared or anyone else puts up a site to serve the data I have no doubt that you’ll eventually find some business model come into play. how the hell does Jared expect to pay for serving the data??? Beleive me I have experience in this area and if its free, people will come and want to download everything he has — no worries, although that really stresses out the bandwidth. The result will be that he will have to implement a donation system, banner ads (maybe google ads or the likes) etc… PS.. I’m also curious why when you go to donate to Jared that Paypal adds a postage fee of $2.50???? Once again, Jared seems to have good intentions but realistically, all these data are already out there - the problem is that there’s still clueless folks coughing up $$ to the resellers. Jared or anyone else, you may as well charge and get a piece of the pie man! Why should the datadepot rake in more than $300,000 a year simply by providing access to free DRGs — moreover, why are “GIS professionals” so clueless and still payinng them for it… that’s the better question;0)

• 10 Jared // Aug 28, 2006 at 8:38 am

  Hi everyone,

  Thanks for the comments. I’ll try to clear up any confusion people are having. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

  I am aware that there are many web sites that provide free downloads of DRG’s. In fact, mine is one of the most popular. See the libre map project: http://libre.redjar.org/maps/

  However, there is no ONE place that has EVERY map and there are many states which are not available on-line. In addition, the sites that do have free downloads, have a couple issues:
  - They are scattered all over the place. This makes them hard to find, which means people that don’t know better, end up buying them. Having every map available from ONE source will make them easier to find.
  - they tend to disappear as the person who runs them loses interest, has a server crash, etc.
  - Data is inconsistent or missing. I’ve seen several sites that offer DRG downloads that are missing certain files or use non-standard naming conventions. The data I have is complete and clean.
  - once the data is available in one place, derivative uses can be established. For example, the maps can be cut into tiles, and someone can make their own layer for a Google Maps type web service.

  In my case, the Internet Archive - http://www.archive.org has agreed to host these maps forever. The Internet Archive is a well established and stable digital library. They’re mission is to archive the sum of all human knowledge and make it freely available via the Internet. They mirror their data around the globe so that the data will still be available by future generations.

  Glenn suggested I have a profit motive. That is not the case. I promise. I’m simply trying to recoup the cost of purchasing the data. (I asked the USGS to give me the data for free and they refused.) Once I recoup my costs, the data is handed over to the Internet Archive and is made freely available forever. They are covering the cost of bandwidth and storage. I am a proponent of making information Free. I support the free software movement, I license all my photos under a Creative Commons license, I contribute to Wikipedia, and for the last 2.5 years I’ve run the Libre Map Project.

  Glenn also mentioned that Paypal is adding postage for donations. That seems to be a bug with Paypal as I explicitly told paypal to not add postage when I created the donation button. I’m going to try to get that fixed as soon as I post this comment. Until that is fixed, you can just decrease your donation amount by a couple dollars to adjust for the weird shipping and handling fee.

  Even if you already have all the DRG’s you need, I hope you’ll consider pitching in a few dollars. If this is successful, I hope it will encourage others to make additional GeoData freely available.

  Thanks a lot!
  -jared

• 11 robs // Aug 28, 2006 at 9:05 am

  Matt,

  you said:

  “The Terra Server extension is the bomb for freee DRG access any where in the country, in arcmap that is. Manifold users will be SOL”

  I guess you didn’t realize that Manifold links to terraserver data in realtime as well (and, it doesn’t require an “extension”). Its just part of the native Manifold import and linking.

  Also, once you zoom to the area you want, in Manifold, you just select “download”, and Manifold will fetch the data for you for that particular area and it will become a permanent image on your desktop. A right click on the image will then allow you to export it as a TIF, ECW, JPG, or other image format. Or, you can export it directly into Oracle spatial as an image with a right mouse click.

  So, I guess Manifold users aren’t so SOL as you indicate

• 12 Matt Priour // Aug 28, 2006 at 9:31 am

  If your in Texas you can get DRGs and all the other “base data” you could ask for via
  Texas Natural Resource Information System (TNRIS)

• 13 Brian Timoney // Aug 28, 2006 at 9:40 am

  James:

  Dusting off my economist hat, the DRG issue highlights an ongoing issue with spatial data:

  Search costs.

  If you have discovered the USDA Gateway, or hit Terraserver with automated WMS requests, then congratulations, you’re the small sliver of the population with the motivation and aptitude to figure it out.

  But there’s a much larger audience for whom paying a ‘data depot’ to spoon feed them the data instead of spending the morning trolling through the bowels of govt agency websites makes sense. Remember, we who enjoy cruising through ‘pub’ folders with our FTP clients are (thankfully) a very small minority.

  Of course, there have been recent attempts to create map-based web portals to ease this very burden. And how would I rate the usability and overall user experience of some of these more touted efforts? Not high.

  Finally, as someone who recently blew half a day tracking down WalMart store data (and even tried to rope in Glenn for the hunt), I can attest to the irritation factor in hunting down data. That said, the IBM consultant sitting next to me on the plane was fascinated by this particular example of dots on a spinning globe…

  Brian

• 14 James Fee // Aug 28, 2006 at 10:03 am

  I think the point of all this though is every DRG online in one place that will be hosted forever.

  Personally I don’t think I’ve paid for a DRG in 10 years, but tracking them down sometimes is a pain (you have to navigate some weird mapserver interface rather than just download the DRGs you need) and urls are always changing.

• 15 Joel Lawhead // Aug 28, 2006 at 11:14 am

  James,

  There is still some confusion here.
  Several comments have mentioned the USDA Lighthouse Project:
  http://datagateway.nrcs.usda.gov/data.html

  It is:
  - 100% free
  - Nationwide (ALL DRGs *are* in one place for the whole country).
  - Has a very usable interface to select the data you need *anywhere* in the country.
  - Very well funded by tax dollars. It’s been there for years and not going anywhere.
  - Has the bandwidth, interface features, and storage to slurp as much data as you want or need for free. You can download your order from an ftp site or order CDs and DVDs.

  They have also “freed” many other federal datasets that you an I have already paid for.

• 16 jesse // Aug 28, 2006 at 11:18 am

  I personally think it’s a great idea. The USDA Gateway interface is not well-known and less-than-ideal to work with, and finding information on the correct way to access TerraServer as a WMS in ArcMap is difficult at best.

  And why do Manifold users get so uptight about comments on “their” software? Lighten up already!

• 17 James Fee // Aug 28, 2006 at 11:18 am

  There is no confusion. USDA is hosting the site. What guarantee do we have that it will be maintained for years to come. The Internet Archive will do this. I never claimed there weren’t free choices, I just like one that becomes part of the community like this one. To each their own.

  One thing you might point out to me Joel is where can I just download without that wacky ArcIMS interface? I just want to browse FTP style.

• 18 KoS // Aug 28, 2006 at 1:40 pm

  The USDA datagateway site will stay up as long as their is support from the public, ie positive feedback to their elected officals.

  For the forseeable future the site will exist, it’s the offical data despository for USDA and it’s agencies.

  Except for soils, soilsdatamart.usda.gov, is the offical depository.

  To play devils-advocate, who is to say the Internet Archive will always be up?

  KoS

• 19 James Fee // Aug 28, 2006 at 2:02 pm

  At least the community as a whole has a say in if it stays up. Given what happened at Rolla, who is to say things don’t change in government circles. What are we arguing about anyway?

• 20 Shane // Aug 28, 2006 at 2:38 pm

  Can I donate DRGs instead?

• 21 Ronski // Aug 29, 2006 at 4:46 am

  Is it the cost of the DRGs or the cost of hosting them (server/storage, bandwidth, security, etc.)?

• 22 James Fee // Aug 29, 2006 at 5:59 am

  the cost of the DRGs. Hosting will be provided free by the intenet archive.

• 23 Marc // Jul 30, 2007 at 3:01 pm

  I really like your idea and the spirit behind!
  DRG maps are public domain in terms of royalty (contrary to all european countries) but they are not so easy to find (that’s probably the common problem when you want to access free stuff).
  I still have 2 questions:
  - are the maps you provide recents? I don’t know precisely the update policy of USGS… But I would like to know if such DRGs maps are as good as commercially available product (like Topo!, topozone, delorme,…)
  - why you don’t provide the capability to download a whole set of maps (for a county, a state)?? It would be very useful when you go to a region and you want to take with you the whole set of corresponding maps…no?

Leave a Comment