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[Jaakko Helleranta.com]

Hi Pierre,

Just a question-comment on the photos aspect of the field verification:

On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 5:27 PM, Pierre Béland <pierzenh at yahoo.fr> wrote:

> These teams will take geolocated pictures of the infrastructures and
> documen them


Do you happen to know what system/process they have for the photos
taking/handling?

It's pretty clear to me (personally, from the different photo-mapping
related things that I've tried) that if we're talking about objects that
are public in nature then Mapillary is the best system/service to use for
(OSM-related) mapping purposes. .. Well, it's the best photo mapping system
that I've tried altogether but for OSM-related uses it's best by a wide
margin.

Three major things stand out that I think would matter for this:
- it's a ready-to-use platform + app + upload management system (with
CC-by-sa license + explicit OSM use permission) and an API
- compass direction is captured in the photos
- iD integration -- integration with JOSM would be easy to do, I've
understood.

There's also an option for a private photos storage (if there would be a
need for that). I don't know of the details of that.

No, Mapillary is not open source. But it's open data. And while the API is
limited for commercial use it's free for non-commercial use. And I can't
think of anything that would come close to usefulness for mapping. Not to
mention the aspect of building a (quite) open street view.
.. I took some 15-20 thousand survey/streetview photos when I lived in
Haiti but haven't really made much use of nearly any of those because I
didn't find a reasonably good system to upload them to benefit mapping.
I've also helped conduct field survey data gathering and the photo
management of the tools I used (both proprietary systems and ODK) was
really not something I'd label as convenient. And now since March I've
taken around 150 thousand photos (of mostly Nicaragua) with Mapillary and
it's already proved very useful for mapping (and more). And take out upload
bandwidth issues (that can be worked around - sending micro SD cards to
high bandwidth location being the last resort) and some relatively speaking
very minor things I've been happy with Mapillary.

Anyways, just wanted to mention this.
The Mapillary dev team is also very responsive, which is a clear plus.
If Mapillary would be used I'd be happy to share my experiences/advice /
help out in using the system.

Cheers,
-Jaakko

--
jaakko at helleranta.com * Skype: jhelleranta
* Mobile: +505-8131-0729 (Nicaragua) * Voice(mail) / SMS: +1-202-730-9778 *
http://about.me/jaakkoh
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