[Openstreetmap] Satellite cost/benefit

[Jo Walsh]

On Sat, Feb 19, 2005 at 02:40:35PM +0000, SteveC wrote:
> The geo-coord archive is down, I was looking for figures but I seem to
> remember 400UKP or so was being said.
http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/pipermail/openstreetmap/2005-February/000244.html 
- minimum buy from Ikonos for this area is about 1075 dollars. (600
  quid?) OKFN and wirelesslondon both offered to help. so we could do
  this for less than 200 more quid. but it's not even a large area of
  london. ( http://space.frot.org/carterra.png )

> When I say 'our' I really mean 'whoever wants to give money to further
> the open geodata cause'.
- i met a donor, or right now the non-project donor, on tuesday. he
  had a wild look in his eyes and talked about model aeroplanes. How
  long, i wonder, would a model plane loaded with electronics last in
  london's skyscape... 

> Second, how do you sell the idea of giving money? Buying satellite data
> is a sexy banner to call people to. 
i think giving is not tied to Ikonos, as long as a/ that is clear and
b/ we provide total accountability for any purchases. GPS collection
could be 'sexy' in the right context: e.g. cyclist groups like the
Tower Hamlets Wheelers of the Camden CC could love this; we could
introduce a street scoreboard for cycle couriers; etc. 

> tertiary: its not very socially inclusive. One person goes and gets an
> image, someone sits down and does GA extraction or maps streets on top.

i suppose it's boring for a person doing map tracing not to have the
change to do map annotation, but hopefully the tasks can be broken
down a bit after line creation... by whatever method

> using out of copyright data
> ---------------------------
> benefits: free, easy to obtain
> costs: out of date data

i still love the New Popular Edition idea and reckon that, at least we
could be able to offer it as a base layer, with a WMS interface. a
cinch with mapserver if they are / we can get them georeferenced. 
(i suppose they all have OS grid lines, and we know the likely
projection... Richard, how is it looking since
http://www.systemed.net/blog/entry041216225441.html )
then hosting/bandwidth is maybe at UCL, or...?

Sorry that this mail is basically as ambivalent as yours. Here in
bristol i'm hoping to get my hands on an (ultimately, traced)
line-segment-and-node street map of town... i'm not sure the creator
sees the full glaring light of cartographic truth though... :/ but i
am still hopeful.

i am happy to mix and match approaches. GPS trace gathering on a wide
scale cannot harm us at all. With the call out, and a stable friendly
service with some feedback, we could get a metric fuckton of data fast. 
we have good momentum here, interest-wise. Schuyler's played with the
douglas-peucker line simplication technique and got interesting if not
totally convincing results. even a GPS layer would be a place to start
tracing...

one important future aspect is portability to other countries, other
conditions. buying Ikonos becomes a tossup between different kinds of
resources and investments, it has gloabl coverage and is easy to "see"
as an investment rather than toys which require other toys, :/...


-jo