A recent paper (M.F. Goodchild, P. Fu and P. Rich (2007) Sharing Geographic Information: An Assessment of the Geospatial One-Stop, AAAG 97(2): 250-266) is a nice overview of some challenges and solution of sharing data sets. The website http://gos2.geodata.gov/wps/portal/gos can be a nice example for setting up relevant data sets for agent-based models.
The OSGeo Foundation is seting up a distributed network for making free geodata available. You can see design specs and additional information at http://www.osgeo.org/geodata/repository. The plan is to use WMS (web map server) interface for some parts of it. This is a real interesting and potentially useful way to go about disseminating data.
Michael Barton
School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Arizona State University
Hi Michael,
it’s already there. Details at
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Repository#PostGIS_serving_vector_data
Markus
Markus,
Can’t reply to your post for some reason. But the OSGeo page you gave a link to is very cool. All interested in sharing geospatial data should take a look at this.
Michael Barton