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?
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.
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?