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

Thu Mar 16 10:47:58 UTC 2017

I agree with James that releasing the source code won’t happen (trade
secrets) and isn’t really useful to the casual OSMer anyways. Of course
we’d love to have more companies and institutions creating and releasing
similar data — but that just suggests what a potentially great gift this is
to OSM. As we say in English, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

More interesting is whether the Facebook team will release the code for
their modified iD instance? Is that possible or planned Drishtie?  Data
validation tools on top of iD’s intuitive interface could be useful for a
lot of OSM users, especially other institutions.

PS — Drishtie identifies herself in the email, for those looking for a name
:-)

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 5:37 PM James <james2432 at gmail.com> wrote:

Micheal, facebook is not going to publish their source code. It doesnt make
finacial sense.

Also maybe you should look up machine learning/neural networks. There is no
code persay. You feed a bunch of data into the neural net and train it for
xyz(takes up a lot of disk space) to recognise what is a road. After that
time the program, based on self feedback can start to identify similar
objects

See speach generation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG-LATBZNBs

Seeing as facebooks computational power will rival that of super computers,
even if you wanted to recreate it, it would probably take you 1000 years of
home computing power to "train" the neural network to recognise roads, at
which point we will all be dead.

On Mar 16, 2017 6:18 AM, "Michael Reichert" <nakaner at gmx.net> wrote:

Hi osm,

Am 2017-03-15 um 03:39 schrieb osm:
> This email is to share the Facebook process and sample data for review by
the OSM community. We welcome feedback.

Almost one month ago, on 18. February 2017, Paul Norman asked you to use
better changeset tags than comment="#nsroadimport #country".
See
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:AI-Assisted_Road_Tracing#Changeset_tags
for his comment. You responded there but your import proposal has not
been modified yet. You "really value feedback" (that's a quote by you
from that talk page)?!

Am 2017-03-15 um 03:39 schrieb osm:
> Our goal is to collaborate with the OpenStreetMap community to create
quality road data, validated by trained mappers and local OSM communities.
Our import documentation on the wiki<
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/AI-Assisted_Road_Tracing> explains the
process in depth, but we're happy to answer any other questions you might
have.

By reading your license
(https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/c/cf/FacebookRoadMaskLicense.pdf)
some questions arose. The whole agreement is really difficult to read
and I ask myself why you choose to use it instead of a well-established
open data license.

FacebookRoadMaskLicense.pdf writes:
> 1.3. Attribution and Resolution Requirements for OSM. For all
> Derivative Data licensed or contributed to OSM by Licensee pursuant
> to this Agreement, Licensee shall include attribution in the
> following format: “Source Imagery © 20XX DigitalGlobe, Inc.”,
> annotating the applicable year.

The terms do not explain where to place the attribution. Therefore this
terms have the same problem as other license which require an
attribution (e.g. CC-BY [1], Datenlizenz Deutschland Namensnennung 2.0).
We do not require our data users to attribute all our source and
therefore the terms are incompatible. Digital Globe must declare that
they are ok if they are only named at
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contributors
This statement should be part of the legal agreement I am quoting from.

> 1.3 […] All contributions of Derivative Data to OSM shall be at a
> resolution of at least five (5) meters between nodes or lower
> resolution (e.g., 10 meters or 15 meters) except for at the ends of
> the vector where connectivity may create additional nodes at a
> spacing smaller than 5 meters.

Why do the terms contain this clause?

> 6.2 […] Facebook may terminate this Agreement or remove any or all of
> the Site and/or Content at any time and for any or no reason
> immediately.

What are the consequences of such a termination? It is unclear whether
the data has to be removed from OSM in that case. If it is so, the terms
are incompatible.

Am 2017-03-15 um 03:39 schrieb osm:
> Why are you using iD Editor versus JOSM?
> We know JOSM is efficient at what we are trying to do. In fact, we
started primarily with JOSM. This said, to make our internal process more
efficient, our engineers improved the iD editor so our version has
comparable functionality as JOSM.

What is your "internal process". OSM is a project in the open, so please
publish how the whole import works from the plain imagery to the final
OSM file to be uploaded. This includes the necessity to publish the
source code of the used software in order that everyone can inspect and
– hopefully – understand it. People want to know how good your
algorithms really are or if it is still more efficient to trace the
imagery.

Am 2017-03-15 um 03:39 schrieb osm:
> What Imagery are you using?
> We are using DigitalGlobe's Vivid+ which is high-resolution (50cm /
pixel, or zoom 18) color-corrected and cloud-free.
>
> Can we share DG imagery?
> While our license does not currently permit this. DG as noted in this
forum<https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57387> is looking at
options to publish imagery for OSM editing similar to the imagery that is
being used by us.

Why doesn't Facebook buy it? Microsoft was/is able to purchase licenses
which allow the usage of the Bing imagery by OpenStreetMap.

> Who are your editors?
> Our team consists of 3 engineers and 14 editors, and usernames can be
found on the Import wiki. All editors have also updated their profile to
say they map for Facebook.

Every OSM user should be able to recognize that they are dedicated
import accounts by having a single slight look at the usernames. This is
currently not possible. Please change them in order that they look like
<username>_facebook_ai_import. The term "import" is most important.

The Import Guidelines write:
> For distributed/community imports, have each person make their own
> import account, for example "your osm user name"_import.

IMHO all your users should have an additional main account *in addition
to their import account*.

> Why did you choose Thailand?
> Facebook has a high number of users in this country and we would like to
improve that map for this community. It is also our mission as a company is
to make the world more open and connected and one way we can do is by
filling in the missing gaps on the map. We also saw a strong OSM community
that we could learn from and engage with while we refine our process for
mapping. We are hoping for community feedback as we move forward so we can
contribute high quality edits.

Did you choose Thailand because it is a developing country and you want
to produce a nice press release and nice blog posts? Of course, your
contributions there are helpful if you do things right. Your
contribtions to OSM at all could be much better and more equally
distributed over the community/world if you would share parts of the
anonymised data you have:

- Facebook knows where people are. Why don't you share data about
locations where regularly people check in? We or you could detect when
a point of interests stops existing (e.g. a restaurant closes).
- Shop operators add information about there facility to Facebook (e.g.
opening hours). Offering this data to OSM would really help us.
- Invest the knowledge of your AI experts into detecting vandalism and
Pokémon Go motivated edits!

There are even more possible ways how Facebook could help OSM but those
are more difficult regarding privacy. Even if you do things right and
only publish anonymised data, people and press will understand you
wrong. :-(

Best regards

Michael

[1] The CC-BY has other problems, too.

PS Please write plain-text emails and add links to the attachments
instead of attaching the to the email. This reduces the size of the email.
PPS The From: header of your email does not contain your name, please
fix this. You can keep using the osm at fb.com address but I would like to
know how is responsible.

--
Per E-Mail kommuniziere ich bevorzugt GPG-verschlüsselt. (Mailinglisten
ausgenommen)
I prefer GPG encryption of emails. (does not apply on mailing lists)

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