[SciPy-dev] Presentation of pymachine, a python package for machine learning

[Peter Skomoroch]

With some digging, we should be able to find text, images, scientific data,
census info, and audio which is in the public domain.  I see this a lot:

"The information on government web pages is in the public domain unless
specifically annotated otherwise (copyright may be held elsewhere) and may
therefore be used freely by the public."

I'm still learning the ins and outs of licensing, but my understanding is
that data/information released as "public domain" can be bundled with
anything, i.e. BSD licenses.  Does anyone have any insight into this?

Here are a few starter sites which mention that the data they provide is in
the public domain:

Geophysical data:

http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/ngdcinfo/onlineaccess.html

Nasa images and measurements:

http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/adc/questions_feedback.html#policies1%22

Weather, forecasts:

http://www.weather.gov/disclaimer.php

Genomic data:

http://www.drugresearcher.com/news/ng.asp?id=10960-snp-database-goes


-Pete

On 5/14/07, David Cournapeau <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
>
> Peter Skomoroch wrote:
> > I followed some of the discussion around datasets in the previous
> > threads.  As you mentioned, it might make sense to make some larger
> > datasets available separately or as cran-style optional installs, but
> > I think it would also be a big plus for scipy to have some more
> > smaller built-in datasets of various types.
> I agree, but there is the problem of licensing. I don't know what is the
> status of data from a legal point of view: if I copy data from a book, I
> guess this is copyrighted as the rest of the book. But then there are
> some famous datasets (eg old faithful, iris, etc...) which are available
> in different softwares with different licenses.
>
> Copying the datasets of R (in r-base) would be useful, but they fall
> under the GPL, hence they cannot be included in scipy, at least if
> datasets are also under the GPL. Unfortunately, I don't know the legal
> details of those cases (status of data in a package licensed under the
> GPL).
>
> Anyway, if I have some useful datasets, I will certainly make them in a
> separate package, so that it can be used outside pymachine.
>
> David
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-- 
Peter N. Skomoroch
peter.skomoroch at gmail.com
http://www.datawrangling.com
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