[Geodata] OpenAerialMap: To what extent does the Geodata committee want to participate?

Christopher Schmidt crschmidt at crschmidt.net
Sun Dec 2 11:23:36 EST 2007


On Sun, Dec 02, 2007 at 05:39:35AM -0800, Jo Walsh wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 07:33:22PM -0500, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> >  1. Is there anyone on the committee who is against this use for an
> >     OSGeo server? The goal of the project is to collect open aerial
> >     imagery from around the world and provide it as a service
> It seems like a great use of the systems with a lot of public benefit,
> a midpoint between 'data easily available' and 'expert processing'.
> Maybe the specific questions i have are better addressed to the 
> OAM-talk list http://openaerialmap.org/mailman/listinfo/talk_openaerialmap.org

Yeah, some of them. I'll answer here, and CC there.

> - is the plan just to run a WMS service or also to make larger
>   'seamless' tiles available for download

Without stating too much, I can state that I have a personal goal of the
latter. Users should be able to get out the imagery of an area for
offline usage -- one example that has already been brought up is 'real'
flight simulators, which are not connected to the internet, but where
aerial imagery could be useful. 

> - how will this work out when some bits of a stitched image are
>   updated over time and others aren't

Not sure what you mean. My eventual goal is to let users build a view
out of any imagery they find useful: so someone looking for historical
data can look at 1949 geotiffs, while someone looking for the most up to
date can look at a local RC plane flight, while someone looking for high
accuracy data can chose to only use orthorectified imagery. Does this
answer your question?

> - how easy will it be to federate/distribute processing and storage
>   if the load on telascience becomes too much, and how can we (the
>   committee / osgeo) help marshal this

I think that the way to do this is to improve OAM such that including
WMS sources is easy and works well: that way, we can simply 'scale' by
setting up more seperate machines that each have a small chunk of WMS
data available on them. There is a need for these machines to be
reliable, but not neccesarily lightning fast. This would also allow us
to hook into other WMS servers -- like the spain WMS -- which are not
hosted by TelaScience/OAM directly, if the providers are open to that.    

> >  2. To what extent does the Geodata committee want to participate in the
> >     project? The current holders of the domain name openaerialmap.org
> >     are willing to donate the domain name to a foundation, and are
> >     looking to participate in the wider community. Does OSGeo wish to
> >     take on the hosting of this type of data? 
> 
> I'd definitely be supportive of this use of the foundation to provide
> formal support, if the project founders and looking for it. 

As far as I understand, the project founders have no need for
'ownerhsip' of the project: I've now taken over DNS for the domain
personally, and I manage all the website stuff. I'm interested in
setting up trac for task tracking (and hoping to use OGSeo's
infrastructure for that, rather than hosting my own).

Essentially, it seems like the current direction of the project puts it
into a prime position for it to be 'incubated', rather than being treated as
'helping' a seperate project, and I'd like to know if we're supportive
of that.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer


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