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/ _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk