Re: Standard example datasets

[Michael D Godfrey]

I have in the past had responsibility for computer-related material. And, I
know people who are expert in this field. The short answer to any question
about rights is that no one knows.  No one even agrees what laws apply to
computer codes or data. And, there is no known case, as far as I know, of
successful prosecutions even in the Java case. The Archive.org has received
demands that material be removed "immediately" but,... One fact is that if
no monetary gain is involved the case for prosecution is harder to make.
It is hard to argue that making data available that is already freely available
from other sources could be illegal (i.e. using R examples, which I also think
would be a good plan, should be acceptable). It might make sense to ask the
R folks if this is OK with them.

Even organizations which are clearly for profit put online, but charge for,
materials, including data, over which they have no copyright.
Wiley is a prominent example of this.

On Sat, 27 Apr 2019 at 21:02, Andrew Janke <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi, Octave maintainers,

Some other statistical programs ship with standard example datasets and
methods to load or explore them. Does Octave have something like this?

For example, R ships with a bunch of example datasets in its "datasets"
package, and you can view a list of them by doing `data()`. And Matlab
ships with a bazillion example datasets that seem to all be just MAT
files in its source code root directories, that you can access with
load, like `load patients`.

Use case: I'm working on table stuff, and would like to add some example
tabular datasets in my package. Wondering if there's a standard
mechanism I should integrate with.

Matlab also comes with such datasets.  Ideally we would have the same
so that examples that use them work in Octave as well.  It would also
simplify some test cases which require generation of input data (I
would arguee that would actually enable them because if generation of
such complex datasets is too complicated then there's no tests for
them).

Anyway, there is already an item on the tracker [1] that lists the
ones in Matlab.  The issue is finding who is the copyright holder of
such data and contact them.

[1] https://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?9544