new gopher services

[Lawrence F. Gall]

Firstly, thanks to several of you on TAXACOM for your comments.  One
general concern was: what do the coordinate data actually represent for
linear features?  I've pasted a segment on this from the USGS/GNIS Data
User's Guide into the gopher help document.

On Tue, 16 Aug 1994 03:06:10 -0700 (PDT), Tom Moritz
<tmoritz at CAS.calacademy.org> wrote:

> 1) Why did Peabody edit out the "map name" field

Laziness, mostly.  I'll look into attaching mapnames to all the gopherized
data after I return from a pending vacation.

> 2) The current format does not permit global searches

My initial reaction is to punt this until the fed folks put up their own
internet service -- not because it is all that difficult conceptually, but
because the several quick methods that spring to mind for doing so would
require either dedicating a fair amount of additional disk space and/or
possibly accepting a larger hit on server processing (but I'll explore).

> 3) Did Peabody do any additional modification/editing of the data
>    (it appears not) -- yet there is some suggestion that we should not
>    have high confidence in the records...?

The data you see come "as is" from the USGS/GNIS.  Perhaps the helpfile
is a bit overly cautious; there is no reason not to have high confidence.

....................................................................
Lawrence F. Gall            internet:  lfg at george.peabody.yale.edu :
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