[Talk-us] Ohio Statewide Imagery Program

[David ``Smith'']

I have recently noticed that Google Earth has incorporated OSIP (Ohio
Statewide Imagery Program,
<http://ogrip.oit.ohio.gov/ProjectsInitiatives/StatewideImagery.aspx>)
imagery into their "historical imagery" feature.  (Actually, I have to
wonder why it's not used more on the default/current image layer, as
in many places it's newer and/or finer-resolution than that layer.)
Anyway, when the OSIP imagery is visible, the attribution portion of
the window does not use the copyright symbol.  Just to be sure about
copyright status, I called Jeff Smith today (his contact info appears
on the OSIP download page) and asked about it.  He said that the OSIP
data is all public-domain.  (I also asked him if he was aware of OSM,
and he said he was, but I didn't press for more details.)

Since this data is public-domain, and newer and/or sharper than the
Yahoo! imagery*, I think it would be very worthwhile to investigate
ways to easily use it for tracing or general reference in OSM.  There
seems to be a WMS service, but I couldn't get JOSM's WMS plugin to
work with it.  While I was able to download georeferenced TIFF files
from OSIP, the PicLayer plugin didn't even support TIFF, and I had to
manually align the imagery anyway.

Is there a JOSM plugin that supports geolocated TIFF or MRSID files?
If not, does anyone know a way to align imagery in JOSM other than
fiddling with the move, scale, rotate tools until it fits existing
data?

I suppose I should poke the trac about adding the OSIP WMS to Potlatch.

I acknowledge that using OSIP may be difficult from a programmer's
standpoint, given that it uses Ohio State Plane projections (which are
conics) rather than Mercator.

* OSIP imagery was captured in 2006 and 2007.  In central Ohio, it
appears to be the newest imagery Google has. Only Mapquest has newer
imagery, apparently from i-cubed.

-- 
David "Smith"
a.k.a. Vid the Kid
a.k.a. Bír'd'in

Does this font make me look fat?