[Talk-us] High resolution off-leaf imagery of Virginia (VBMP)

[Josh Doe]

I'm not sure how many are aware of this, but the Commonwealth of
Virginia regularly acquires high resolution orthoimagery, through the
Virginia Base Mapping Program, administered by the Virginia
Information Technologies Agency (VITA). Some of this data is in the
public domain. Specifically, the flights from 2002 and from 2006/2007
are available online [1], and Google even uses some of this imagery
for certain parts of Virginia (though not in my area). The imagery
from 2006/2007 varies in resolution from 6 inches to 1 foot.

Unfortunately this data is only available via an ArcGIS Server, using
their REST interface. I made an attempt to write a plugin to support
that interface in JOSM but was unsuccessful, however through some
trickery I was able to create a local OSM-style tile cache of my small
area of interest, and have found it very useful due to the high
resolution and especially because I can see right through the trees,
since it's off-leaf.

It's expected that later this year VBMP imagery from 2009 is to be
released into the public domain. This imagery varies in resolution
between 3 inches and 1 foot. VITA is testing a WMS server, but there
are no guarantees it will become available.

If anyone is interested in adapting JOSM and/or Potlatch2 to support
the ArcGIS REST tile interface, please let me, as I'd be interested in
collaborating.

It would be fantastic for Virginia OSMers to have access to this data,
especially when the 2009 imagery becomes available!

Regards,
-Josh

[1]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Virginia#Virginia_Base_Mapping_Program_.28VBMP.29_Orthoimagery