[Imports] Facebook's AI-Assisted Road Tracing for OSM

[Christoph Hormann]

First of all thanks for finally starting discussion of this in the 
proper channels now.

Here my initial questions and comments in rough order of priority with 
the most important ones first:

* Where is the data to be imported?  The OpenStreetMap project is 
founded on the idea of openness and for the import consultation process 
to work properly we need to be able to look at either the data to be 
imported or the process to generate this data in full.  There cannot be 
a carte blanche to import data that has not been scrutinized by the 
community and that is generated using a proprietary process.

Side note: Because the data is not available in full at the moment i 
will refrain from commenting on this just based on the small sample you 
attached which might or might not be representative for the whole 
country and for which it is unclear to what extent manual editing has 
already been applied.

* Who is doing the import?  What experience do these people have in OSM?  
The wiki page lists a number of import accounts but none of these 
reference a normal non-import mapping account.  Mapping experience in 
OSM is generally of great importance for being able to properly do an 
import so this would be important to know.  Also it has otherwise 
always been common practice in OSM for corporate mappers to show up 
with their real names - you would probably be well advised to follow 
this practice.  You could take the Mapbox approach as an example here 
[1].

* Why don't you make the images used available for manual mapping?  Yes, 
i know you currently don't have the license for that but i am pretty 
sure DG would be happy to sell you a license.  It is not really 
convincing in my eyes that the effort you put into automatic extraction 
of roads is actually cheaper than such a license, especially given that 
the images would allow mapping a lot more than just roads.  In other 
words: For the OSM community imagery contributions would be much more 
valuable than what you propose here so you need to expect a significant 
uphill battle if you want to import but not provide the imagery.

* Do you, and if yes how do you make sure the roads you import are 
compatible with what has been mapped in OSM otherwise (like for example 
roads not crossing buildings, water areas etc.)

* How do you deal with clouds in imagery? (No, DG +Vivid imagery is not 
cloud free [2])

* Are there any other data sources used to generate the roads other than 
DigitalGlobe imagery and OSM data?

One important remark mainly for others participating in discussion here:  
The quality of imagery available in the Bing and Mapbox imagery layers 
is in significant parts not the best that is openly available for 
Thailand.  Although open data imagery is usually not suited for mapping 
smaller roads, especially in densely vegetated areas, many of the 
samples shown of poor Bing imagery in context of this import plan are 
misleading in that regard because they show very old imagery far below 
today's base quality level openly available.  Providing up-to-date open 
data imagery for Thailand would be a fairly useful limited cost effort 
to improve the basis for manual mapping in Thailand.

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapbox
[2] 
https://dg-cms-uploads-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/document/file/2/DG_Basemap_Vivid_DS_1.pdf

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/