This statement on the use of data products acquired through Unidata appeared in the Summer 1995 Unidata newsletter.

Using Data Acquired by Unidata

Dave Fulker

Unidata Program Director

General Guidelines

There are some restrictions on the usage of data acquired through the Unidata Program. Covering all types of information is the general guideline that data are provided solely for education and research; there are two reasons for this restriction:

The reliability of information gained through Unidata is intended to be satisfactory only in an education or research context; in those contexts, it is assumed that outages and errors are expected and dealt with by the users of the data1. These data are not suited for operational or decision-making uses, and it would be dangerous to use them in those contexts.
Unidata is funded by the National Science Foundation (and, for facilitating access to NEXRAD Information Dissemination Service [NIDS] data, by the National Weather Service [NWS]) to support education and research. Therefore, the terms and conditions under which Unidata acquires data reflect that objective.

Specific Rules

More specific rules apply to particular data streams, and some of these require individual agreements between each user organization and the provider of the data. Though authoritative interpretation of usage matters necessarily must be based upon such agreements and not upon any statement made herein, the following guidelines may be helpful to those who wish to gain an informal impression of how certain information from Unidata may be used:

As long as the data remain within a single organization and physical campus (typically a university department), all education- and research-oriented usage generally is permitted. In some cases, such as for lightning data from Global Atmospherics, Inc., the individual data access agreements require that research results be shared with the data provider and that attribution be included in all publications where the data (or derived values) appear.
Great caution must be exercised in placing data on servers or otherwise permitting access from outside the organization, such as through the World Wide Web. Such uses are permitted for data acquired from the Unidata/Wisconsin service or the NWS Family of Services (FOS), as long as the purposes for making them available (such as to support K-12 school projects) are educational or research oriented. However, other types of data, such as lightning or NIDS data, may not be published on the Web or otherwise shared outside the receiving organization except with the explicit approval of the data provider.

(In the NIDS case, data over 48 hours old may be distributed freely, but earlier off-campus uses must be approved by WSI.)

Rationale

Questions have arisen about why there are any constraints at all on the redistribution of data acquired through Unidata. Though the background is complex, there is a simple answer: Unidata, on behalf of the university community, has gained access to these data through contractual arrangements and necessarily must pass along terms and conditions that affect how the data can be used. (To be precise, the contractual arrangements are made by UCAR, the corporate home for Unidata.)

It may be illustrative to examine in greater detail three distinct cases--lightning data, NIDS data, and FOS--from among the various data streams that can be acquired with Unidata systems. For lightning data, all steps in the process of taking measurements, assembling the data, and creating products are performed by a private firm (Global Atmospherics, Inc.), so there is no question about who owns the data; in this case it is perfectly clear that access to these data by Unidata universities (especially on the current no-cost basis) represents a significant opportunity regardless of any usage constraints that may be imposed.

In contrast, the FOS data are collected and assembled into products at government expense, and anyone who acquires these feeds directly from the NWS (at a government-defined price) can use these products essentially without constraints. For reasons of economy, Unidata decided not to acquire these data directly from the NWS, instead choosing (after an open competition) to make arrangements with Alden, Inc., for injecting the FOS into Unidata's Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system. These arrangements limit usage to education and research, but that definition is consistent with Unidata's mission.

The NIDS system represents an interesting combination of public and private efforts. While the NWS operates the observation platforms, the system relies entirely on the private sector to operate the networks by which data are assembled on a national basis. Also, the only nationwide composite images of NEXRAD data that exist are prepared in the private sector. Due to the joint nature of this public-private effort, a small number of commercial firms (the four NIDS vendors) have proprietary interests in the data produced. This situation makes it impractical or impossible for Unidata to offer universities these data with the same flexibility as for the FOS.

Therefore, Unidata also held an open competition for the provision of NIDS data, in which usage flexibility was evaluated along with other factors such as price. Unidata's present agreement with WSI, Inc.--an agreement that has broken new ground and yielded promising results--grew out of this competition. In particular, we are very appreciative of WSI's trust in the IDD method for delivering these proprietary data. We want to encourage all Unidata users to help us warrant this trust by understanding and adhering strictly to all usage constraints that pertain. More detail can be found in the spring 1994 issue of the Unidata Newsletter, which was a special edition on data delivery issues.

Back to the FAQ page.