On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 06:52:23PM +0200, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote: > 2009/8/11 Yves Moisan <[email protected]>: > > Who are those players who would want to provide their own high res > > aerial images to a service like OAM instead of waiting for Google to > > update their area? All levels of government (maybe especially > > cities ??) are the most obvious such players IMO because they do not > > normally have a commercial interest in keeping their data for > > themselves. They don't sell their images; they use them. > > Actually in Germany or Italy they do sell these images, especially > cities, and they are all but cheap. > What about the US military? They are expected to have nice quality > pics of many parts of the world. If they are hosting such an event, > maybe they can think of releasing some more imagery in PD? ;-)
The USGS and other federal governmental organizations have always made offers to publish data whenever possible. The problem is that there is such a massive quantity of data that I have not yet seen anyone suggesting a suitable architecture to manage the data. Every other year, all of the (continental?) US is flown at 1M and 2M resolutions as part of various government projects. 1M resolution imagery for the entire country, every year, dating back decades, is hundreds of terabytes of data. Without a coherent plan as to how to obtain, manage, provide, display, etc. this data, it is unreasonable to think that an organization who does not have a mandate to do such would make it a high priority. One of the reasons that I stopped actively pushing forward the OAM project is simply because the project proved untenable -- not due to lack of data, but due to abundance. There is simply so much, that once you start fielding offers of data, you may find you have bitten off more than you can chew. My belief at this point is that OAM should not be a project designed to provide a 'tiled satellite/aerial map' of the world. Instead, it should be a clearinghouse -- a repository for data information, a catalog for people who *do* provide data. Link to other people, and encourage interlinking. Take advantage of the web -- don't centralize, federate. If you can make information about geographic data sources available, and encourage people who aren't serving their data already to do so, you can make life better for everyone. The goal of a single worldwide map is probably out of reach for the time being -- and in any case, is less useful than a way to find out about all the data that *isn't* in the map yet, to find out if the one spot you really care about does have data. Best Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://openaerialmap.org/mailman/listinfo/talk_openaerialmap.org
