It’s not often that I praise the United States of America, but one thing which I do like about them is their policy towards making data created by government agencies free of copyright (in most cases) and available for download over the Web. As a result, I can obtain a complete list of geographical names (which will be really useful for my research, as I need to recognise locations within a corpus of text) in an open standard format, for free, with no restrictions on usage. The file also contains huge amounts of geographical information, which isn’t necessary for my work at the moment but could be interesting later on. This is completely different to the UK, where lots of information is collected and held by the Ordnance Survey (or the Royal Mail if you want postcode to coordinates mapping), which will require you to remortgage your house in order to afford the licences for their data.
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2 thoughts on “Good old USA”
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you can get that data for free for academic research purposes.
doesn’t help most people, but does help you 🙂
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of that. I’d prefer that the data was free for everyone as otherwise it limits who can make use of my work (assuming anyone ever wants to!) but I suspect that’s unlikely to become the case for some time.