[OSGeo-Discuss] Anyone openly georeferencing maps and pictures in time?

[Tim Lund]

Hi

This is a project idea which seems obvious to me, and one which would so
obviously benefit from OSGeo involvement, that I feel someone on this list
will know very quickly if anyone is working on it in an open data way.  It
comes from thinking about the warping which needs to be done to get from an
aerial photograph to a map, and extending the thought to what can be done
with a very oblique image - such as I might take standing on the ground.
 Any photo, not just an aerial one, can be considered as a map just waiting
to be tagged with scale,  projection, geolocation and date.  The photo
doesn't have to be great quality - perfection is not needed.  In fact, if
we allow some artistic licence, we could apply the same process to scans of
historic prints and paintings.

And if we had a library of such geotagged images, researchers would be able
to specify an area and a time range, and search for images whose area of
coverage overlapped it taken during the given period.  It would be of
antiquarian interest - there's an organisation I belong to called the London
Topographical Society  <http://www.topsoc.org/front/index> which has access
to a mind-boggling number of maps, old photos and prints of London - but
also to academics in Geography and Town Planning departments.  It would
also be of commercial interest to developers looking at the planning
context for new developments.  And I think I've read somewhere of
commercial companies - Google, Facebook? - collecting various picture of
the same location, e.g. a holiday destination, and using the combined data
to produce images with unwanted obstructions eliminated.  It has to be
possible, so is anyone working on developing an open source library of
images so tagged?

Brief background on me; I'm a maths graduate, now approaching retirement,
and with interests not only in history, but also urban development, so a
project along these lines is something I'd love to get involved with.
 Although I might dream to doing some coding, that's just not realistic
when my skills are more in MS Office applications and VBA.  I've also been
looking at 'R' and QGIS, and I could get to the point of doing the tagging,
except for date stamping, but if there was anyone else further up the
learning curves for these, it would be good to link up.  I also have a lot
of possible contacts with people who might be interested in such a project
as users, which would also make a difference.

It seems like such a nice project, so hoping someone can help
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