ok so i’m trying to understand the structure of the whole OSM project. i generally like it but it’s confusing and i’m confused.
i’m specifically looking for satellite image data (landscape as seen from above, no infrastructure data, just real photography). i like satellite images a lot because it provides a much better feel for the landscape than infrastructure data alone. such as: how many trees are there, how much nature is there around, …
does OSM itself do this? (ideally without having to be logged in)
i found OpenMapTiles which seems to also provide satellite data; but i’m not sure what their relation to OSM is. are they a separate project?
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You can check out official (as from the government) aerial images. I know German states have such. In Hessen it’s named ATKIS DOP20, I think.There are different ways to make these images. Digitale Orthophotos try to fix the photos with geodata to get rid of perspective and such. I think there is even a clear sky version, which picks the best images from different years. All such images are fixed up in some way, that includes google etc
These have quite open licenses https://opendata.hessen.de/de/dataset/atkis-dop-20 : https://www.govdata.de/dl-de/zero-2-0
yeah i have thought about collecting all publicly accessible aerial views and putting them on some kind of disk for backup.
the issue is, just to map all of germany would take 3 TB of storage space if you make photos with 30 cm per pixel. for the whole world it would be 3000 TB and i don’t have that amount of storage space.
You can use their WMS API, I use that in JOSM as layers simetimes
ok so it seems that OpenMapTiles is just a frontend for https://www.maptiler.com/ which is a company different from Maxar / MapBox and you can buy their services to embed maps in your own application / website. so it’s a commercial thing, if i understand this correctly.
but they do offer some type of tiles (= pre-rendered map parts) freely, namely those that are based on open data sources. so the infrastructure map tiles are free to use, but satellite tiles are not, if i understand this correctly.
No, OpenStreetMap has no aerial imagery of their own.
Editors like iD and JOSM and end-user apps like OsmAnd rely on third-party imagery for over/underlays, and the most prominent among these is Bing.
OpenStreetMap under the hood is simply a database of key–value pairs assigned to nodes, lines, polygons, and “relations” between those three.
Edit: And yes, OpenMapTiles is a separate thing, and any of its aerial imagery would also not be its own. It’s prohibitively difficult for but a few select organizations to maintain aerial imagery like that. You can read more here.
OpenStreetMap under the hood is simply a database of key–value pairs assigned to nodes, lines, polygons, and “relations” between those three.
yeah i suspected as much
so this might sound wild at first but i think it makes sense to compare the data structures of a project like OSM to a computer game like minecraft. basically, in the minecraft world, there’s 3 separate types of data storage:
- chunk storage is a 3-dimensional array that just stores the type of block found at each x,y,z-location. as such, reading the array (and taking the block with the highest z-value that is not air) gives you an aerial view. this is comparable to a photograph (aerial view).
- structure storage. this tells you, for example, if you have a chest, what is inside it. this assignes function to physical space, similar to how OSM assignes meaning (house, street) to a chunk of physical space. This is where the “relations” between x,y,z-nodes and polygons comes in.
- the third type is storage for movable objects, such as players moving around in the world; since they are not fixed objects, they cannot be assigned simple static x,y,z-coordinates so easily. but i think for OSM there’s no good analogy.
Edit: And yes, OpenMapTiles is a separate thing, and any of its aerial imagery would also not be its own. It’s prohibitively difficult for but a few select organizations to maintain aerial imagery like that. You can read more here.
I’ll read the link later, thank you.!
There is a separate project, OpenArealMap, for Free as in Freedom areal/satellite images. Most useful images are proprietary though. Some, like Bing, allow limited usage of their images for improving OSM, some don’t.
OpenArealMap
*OpenAerialMap
ooh, thank you!
You can’t on osm.org, but you can use MapCompare and see a portion of Earth both on OSM and via Aerial imagery.
@gandalf_der_12te it’s quite a common misconception that OpenStreetMap is a map, and arguably its name and the website showing a map don’t really help there.
But it really is just a database of coordinates and tags that describe features found and those coordinates. You can use this database to generate maps, and there are several projects that do this.
Another common misconception is that what Google and other big players call “Satellite” view or images is rarely 1/2
taken with satellites. You’d have clouds in the way, very low resolution, and other issues. The higher quality ones are aerial images and this is what people are usually looking for. There are a couple sources listed at https://osm.wiki/Vertical/_Aerial/_Photographs
Getting these to display in an application depends on the application, and there is no “OSM application” except for maybe the iD editor. Everything else is developed by third parties. 2/2
OSM doesn’t do this, but there are freely licensed satellite images out there. Usually they are produced by or for national governments and often ended up freely licensed precisely because OSM people asked for that…
For my country this is basemap.at and it would actually be an interesting project to aggregate such things in one UI, but I am not aware anyone has done that yet.
For my country this is basemap.at and it would actually be an interesting project to aggregate such things in one UI, but I am not aware anyone has done that yet.
thanks, in fact i wouldn’t even care so much about the UI app itself, but about having that satellite data in case somebody wants to do something with it.
i understand that there’s a whole lot of technical hurdles in the way, such as: who hosts the data? who updates it? who sanitizes it? who carries the server costs for the storage space and network load?
it would just be very interesting to understand the underlying technology needed to build such an open map service. i’m thinking, we have the fediverse for communication; there’s servers and clients. what would an equivalent map service look like?
@schnurrito @gandalf_der_12te an ‘open mosaic’ has been done multiple times however a) it is a lot of work and cost even if the imagery is “free”, b) while there is a lot of high res (that is 30cm or better nominal resolution) data available most of the world isn’t covered.
Do you have an example of that?
Not seeing the option in osmand, but I’d love to know if it’s a possibility
OsmAnd is not OpenStreetMap. Its a third party client to the OpenStreetMap data.
OsmAnd can have aerial imagery, Configure Map > Map Source ( > Add More ) > Microsoft Hybrid
