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?

  • Aniki@feddit.orgOPEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    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?