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Last year, I requested info from FSU and received a reply that the particular information was not available to the general public. pshaw! I found a backdoor for the info I wanted.

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That is the problem.

Weather information that is provided by the government is paid for by tax dollars, is public domain, and should be so.

Not all university research is funded through tax dollars. A surprisingly large amount is funded by private interests, and in such cases bound by legal agreements, and by definition is not public domain. What is further, there is a difference between an experimental prototype, which is still being researched and improved, and any targeted future commercial product that can be derived from it.

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I like being able to have many different types of data to look through.

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Just because information exists, doesn't mean it is public domain.

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I suppose Accounting has some means of seperating the dollars such that the University can say, 'this is public domain' or 'this is private copyrighted work'
Unfortunately their logic seems to be, 'we're afraid of getting sued' so let's hide all this information.

I'd be happy with a middle ground, where they set up a somewhat restricted access that let people sign up after agreeing to some sort of EULA to the effect of: 'I understand that these are not forecast products and are here for educational purposes. yadda yadda'

Having not seen the models, nor seen what it takes to power them, I don't know how much computing power is needed to produce the models in question. Nor do I know how and were the information is stored. or if it would be accessable by another party. But in a perfect world.

Build a GPL'd software that is able to:
1) generate the datapoints needed to model the atmospheric changes over time
2) create a graphical model of said datapoints to enable easy understanding of the information generated.

2 can be created from having access to the raw data.

being able to create a system to generate the raw data would be an amazing and spectacular project, (yeah, see that one up on sourceforge) but honestly, I don't even have enough information to know where to start.

(if computing power is an issue. ther'es always a internet distributed project like [Email]seti@home)[/Email]

The big question comes down to, who's paying for the raw data.

yeah, I'm all over the map with this post; so I'll shut up now.
-Mark

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M. S. Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Tech - May 2020
NOAA MADIS/HADS Programmer
U. Arizona PhD Student

Edited by danielw (Mon May 29 2006 12:48 AM)

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