Wednesday, October 01, 2008

The Missing VMAP 1 Data...

I gotta be honest with you... something that drives me up the wall is when public agencies either move or remove a web service, data product or ?? without any explanation or without any paper trail what so ever. Case in point, I have a popular data tip article on GISuser describing and pointing users to the NIMA VMAP data - theses data are... er, were easily accessible via ftp download from the NGA/NIMA website. Now it turns out that all the pointers to these data are broken and users simply get the familiar error page - try hitting this link and you'll see what I mean http://geoengine.nga.mil/ftpdir/archive/vpf_data/v1053.tar.gz.

If you head off to the VMAP 1 boundaries website, then select an area of interest (click on a yellow box), you are then sent to the raster roam page where you are provided with additional information on these data. Then the problem when you click on the FTP download link to access the .tar.gz file. Links are still live, however, the file with 0 for a file size is no longer available.
On the bright side, VMAP 0 data are available for download and you can also grab the data HERE as SHP files. Again, please don't waste your $$ buying the raw data from an online data "eating" resource like the datadepot or others... the same or even more currrent data are easily available via public sites like this.

Anyone have any ideas about this?? An email sent to the contact person provided has no yielded any response.
See http://geoengine.nga.mil/


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