Academic Torrents – Making 27TB of research data available

I find it fascinating how difficult it is to find geological data. The combined datasets of oil and mining companies plus government data has a huge amount of Earth mapped. And yet, this data is extremely hard to find in a computer-consmable way. Most of it is locked up in pdf or image scans of maps, or locked in proprietary MapInfo/Autodesk formats. It seems to me that a large dataset of all human knowledge of Earth would be massively valuable…

API suggestions: 1). Don't use hard coded values for types >GET /apiv2/entries?cat=6 -- List entries that are datasets >GET /apiv2/entries?cat=5 -- List entries that are papers These could be written as: /apiv2/entries/datasets /apiv2/entries/papers 2). You may not need path elements like entries, entry, collection, and collection name. For example further simplification would leave /datasets /papers 3). Don't use capitals like this, switch to lowercase: /apiv2/entry/INFOHASH 4). Use HTTP verbs in a standard…

The team should learn from the ghost-town that is BioTorrents[1] and offer more than just a tracker. [1] http://www.biotorrents.net/browse.php?incldead=1

Yeah, it could really benefit from some organizational work, like on more mature music torrent trackers or such. Categories, mandatory tags, unified names, reviewed by community-chosen category-wise moderators. In it's current state in's basically a file dump, either you have the direct link, or you can only hope to find something interesting. Not that much better than sharing magnet links via public pastebin records...