[okfn-discuss] Data for a graph on Earth

Mon Jan 12 10:29:10 UTC 2009

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Gael Varoquaux
<gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 05:44:38PM +0000, Rufus Pollock wrote:
>>

[snip]

> This data is really nice. It sure can be useful to create a nice graph.
> However, for my use in Mayavi, I would like 3D-positioned data, and the
> US is not big enough for the curvature of the Earth to be significant.
>
> What I am really looking for is graph data that is naturally embedded in
> 3D. Hint, hint, if anyone on this mailing list has this kind of data, and
> can release it in an open license, I'll try as hard as I can to do a
> really nice visualization out of it.

If only I'd know you were looking for /any/ kind of data and not just airports!

Geonames (http://www.ckan.net/package/read/geonames) has a whole bunch
of info available for download under a cc attribution license. In
particular they have conveniently split out a whole bunch of items
including all cities > 1000, >5000, > 15,000 inhabitants, e.g.:

<http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/cities15000.zip>

(This is the kind of thing we'd like to split out in CKAN but haven't
yet got around to doing ...)

Regards,

Rufus