[talk-au] NearMap PhotoMap imagery for OSM

[ben last]

On Wed, 4 Nov 2009, John Smith wrote:
> Do you work for this company, or have a contact with them?


Just so the list knows... I work for NearMap (as does Alex K), and I'm happy
to respond to enquiries on the list.  There are actually a few of us on
various OSM forums and lists, but being a public company we're sometimes a
little bit constrained in what we can say.  The best way to interact with us
is via the forum on the NearMap site
(http://www.production.nearmap.com/community/contribute.aspx and click on
Forum), but I get the emails on this list and will read those that refer to
us :)

Anyway, in answer to a few of the questions that have come up:
* We use different aircraft in different locations; the comments by James
Andrewartha about the HyperPod are pretty much on the button.

* The need for authentication to access the website has been fully removed
now, so JOSM should be able to query our servers directly.

* We added the licensing about tracing for OSM specifically to allow use of
our images to boost the OSM data.  If you read more on our website (for
example, http://www.production.nearmap.com/help/faq.aspx#Gq4) you'll see
that we generate our StreetMap tiles from the OSM data, so it's very much to
our mutual benefit to get that data as up-to-date as we can.  In fact, since
we all live in Perth, there are quite a few updates to the data that we've
contributed, using the Potlatch custom URL format.

* Load balancing: all the externally available hostnames resolve to balanced
IPs, so you could use any of the web0-web7 or www hostnames.  However, to
make sure that you get the best service, including using the nearest web
servers to you (in net-connectivity terms), use www.nearmap.com.

* Accuracy: this is important to us!  The initial surveys of some cities
suffered some teething troubles with hardware and the accuracy suffered. 
You can generally expect the accuracy to be as good as the recent Perth
surveys, and when we reprocess the older surveys they will get more
accurate.
If you are assessing accuracy and find somewhere that we appear to be way
out (preferably against a known reference point), then please let us know,
via the forum.

* Caching tiles: if you can, please do.  They're served with strong etags
and suitable Cache-Control and Max-Age headers.  If your system honours
those, you'll get updated images in a reasonable time frame and avoid
hitting our servers too hard.  Incidentally, if you do try and suck down
tiles at a very high rate, you may well get throttled and start getting 509
responses.

Cheers
Ben
-- 
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