[OSM-talk] Crowdfunding for OpenStreetMap in Bénin : 275km² high resolution satellite imagery for Cotonou by 1-May 2016!
Christoph Hormann
chris_hormann at gmx.de
Thu Apr 28 11:44:13 UTC 2016
On Thursday 28 April 2016, Greg Morgan wrote:
>
> The problem I have with both Christoph and Frederick statements from
> Germany are that the comments have a feeling of not invented here and
> more imperialism.
I think you are barking up the wrong tree here.
Most of my mapping in OSM is in areas much more severely
underrepresented in usual image sources than Benin. So i am well aware
of the problem of cultural and economic bias in remote mapping sources
and i have also discussed this several years ago already [1].
But you do not solve this problem by buying satellite imagery for the
areas you find underrepresented. Satellite operators like
Airbus-DS/CNES and DigitalGlobe are not any more neutral than companies
like Mapbox, they likewise 'serve priority markets' and you are not
going to change these priorities with a few thousand bucks of crowd
sourced money. To really overcome these problems you'd need to create
the means to locally produce comparable data sources through aerial
imaging.
But to do something productive instead of just talking i set up some
open imagery for the area in question [2]. This is of course not in
any way comparable to what is envisioned by the Benin community but it
is way better than what in the crowd funding campain is shown as the
currently available level. You won't be able to trace buildings or
smaller urban streets from it but there is still a lot of map-worthy
stuff that can be derived from this data (even more if you also use
infrared data which i left out for the purpose of ease of use) and it
is recent, from December last year. Also this should show that there
are truly open image sources that are frequently better in either
actuality or resolution than what Bing and Mapbox offer.
[1] http://blog.imagico.de/new-franz-josef-land-map/
[2]
http://maps.imagico.de/#map=9/6.702/2.215&lang=en&l=sat&r=osmim&o=3&ui=8
tms:http://imagico.de/map/osmim_tiles.php?layer=S2A_R022_N06_20151221T103009&z={zoom}&x={x}&y={-y}
--
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/
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