[okfn-discuss] Open topological data

Mon Dec 22 16:30:29 UTC 2008

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 3:02 PM, Gael Varoquaux
<gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 09:49:04AM +0000, Rufus Pollock wrote:
>> If so the most immediate item that comes to mind is the topography
>> data from the SRTM:
>
>> http://www.ckan.net/package/read/geo-srtm
>
> That's fantastic, exactly what I needed.

Good to hear it was useful.

>> That data is public domain (from NASA) and available via ftp. However
>> quite large and in fairly raw form so may need some processing
>
> numpy make it trivial to do: the NASA docs say it is raw data made of signed
> two byte integers, on a grid of shape 3601x3601, in other words:
>
>    import numpy as np
>    data = np.fromfile('N36W113.hgt', '>i2')
>    data.shape = (3601, 3601)

Thanks for this tip -- while I'm a numpy user myself I didn't realize
it was this simple.

[snip]

>> Or just search packages generally:
>
>> <http://www.ckan.net/package/search>
>
> CKAN is great. I need nice datasets for examples with Mayavi, I think
> I'll find a lot of inspiration. Thanks for the tip, I should have thought
> about CKAN.

Glad it was useful and if you come across any open datasets yourself
do let us know so we can add them to CKAN (or feel free to add them
yourself ...).

Regards,

Rufus