Finding Data with Dapple

There has been lots of buzz lately about finding data. 

 

The other day someone asked me where they could find geology data for Namibia using Dapple.  Searching for spatial data has numerous challenges associated with it (just try searching for “Namibia geology” in your usual search tools) that I won’t get into here. Instead I’d like to share my suggestions with you.

 

Using Dapple, first I selected the country I’m interested in from the Overview Map list. This sets my spatial search ‘area of interest’. 

 

  

 

Then I entered my keyword “geology”.  

 

 

 

The results in my Server list didn’t turn up anything that I found to be useful. But the results in the Web tab were much more useful!

 

The Web tab accesses a catalog created and maintained by a web crawler called DappleSearch.  It looks for servers on the internet that publish spatial data such as WMS Servers and ArcIMS Servers. 

 

The OneGeology portal (recently reported by the BBC) is a collection of spatial data servers publishing 1:1,000,000 geology maps for the world. These datasets are just one of the data sources included in the DappleSearch results. 

 

If you like what you see, grab a GeoTIFF from Dapple, or use the link and go straight to the source.  You can also add WMS or ArcIMS to your own Server list.

 

 

Happy spatial data searching!