Possible Data Sources for Your Project

Here are some suggested data sources for your Unix and HoloDraw project. Of course, you are still free to use data from other sources. In fact, these are not guaranteed to be the easiest data sets to work with, as an incentive for you to spend at least a little time searching for your own data.

• USGS Earthquake Search
  Select a search area, then I recommend choosing 5. Spreadsheet Format (comma delimited) and using awk to extract latitude, longitude, and depth. Remember that depth is probably in Km while latitude and longitude are in degrees, so you will have to use drawsize.pl to apply a conversion factor. (See How to Make a 3D Drawing using HoloDraw for a more detailed discussion of this issue.)
• The Mystery Data
  Can visualization techniques help you discover patterns in data? All you know about this file is that the first column is degrees North/South, the second column is degrees East/West, and the third column is elevation in feet.
• Mt. St. Helens
  Seismic activity (earthquakes) recorded below Mt. St. Helens over the past year. Some geologists hypothesize a rising body of magma. Can you find a way to see it?
• USGS Mineral Resource Data System
  Select Data, choose an area that interests you, add samples to your shopping cart and check out (it's free). Output file format Text (comma-delimited) and look for longitude and latitude in decimal. (Degrees-Minutes-Seconds is too hard to work with.) Maybe you can find a third column that would make sense to plot in the Z dimension, or maybe you will just end up with a 2-D plot showing the distribution of mineral deposits.

Written by Marvin Simkin Filename data.html Last updated October 21, 2004