[Talk-us] [OSM-talk] Decline in accuracy of capture date metadata in Bing imagery

Kevin Kenny kevin.b.kenny at gmail.com
Wed Jul 26 20:05:51 UTC 2017


On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Bryan Housel <bryan at 7thposition.com> wrote:
> What can you do to help?
>
> We collect this imagery data here:
> https://github.com/osmlab/editor-layer-index
>
> Once it is added to the editor layer index, it will be available in iD and
> other editors.

This plea appears to assume that volunteers will be at your level of
sophistication.

> There is lots of public imagery out there, but we need volunteers to:
>
> 1. find it in the first place

I know where it is for my state:
http://gis.ny.gov/gateway/mg/index.html

> 2. contact state GIS agencies for permission, if the website does not make
> license clear

I have contact information, which I'm not going to share here.
A template for the letter requesting permission would be very helpful,
since it's not immediately clear how to describe the intended use to
an agency. It would be even more helpful to be able to have contact
information for a resource person to answer any legal questions that
the agency might have. Surely someone's done this before, for the
specific case of a state's orthoimagery with this being the intended
use!

> 3. figure out whether the WMS server can serve the imagery (some serve
> TMS/WTMS tiles that can be consumed directly in iD, others serve WMS which
> can sometimes be proxied)

This question seems to be asking for technical details about which I'm
rather ignorant - and I'm dealing with this from the standpoint of a
person who has set up a TMS server and who has at least
given the metadata about external map servers to programs such as JOSM
and QGIS. I have no idea what iD, say, requires at the back end, or
whether the information provided in
http://gis.ny.gov/gateway/mg/webserv/webserv.html
is useful to you (or what else is needed beyond that).

> 4. add the source to editor-layer-index, along with a boundary polygon where
> the imagery is valid.

The CONTRIBUTING.md file presumes familiarity with GeoJSON, with the
specific schema in use to describe the map layers, and with a lot of
subtleties that may be obvious to someone accustomed to maintaining
the software stack, but surely are not obvious to the average
mapper. When I look at it, I wind up mentally saying, "yeah, maybe one
of these days I'll have time to tool up with all this stuff."

I suspect it might be a more profitable use of everyone's time to have
mappers like me run interference with the GIS agencies (with the help
of someone who can speak for the project to answer legal questions),
and to separate the tasks of finding out information such as what I've
presented here from the technical details of encoding it in GeoJSON
and testing with the various data consumers.

I'm sorry if I'm sounding harsh here. I really would like to see this
move forward. Help me to help you!



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