OpenAerialMap

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OpenAerialMap (OAM) is an open source platform for hosting aerial imagery from the Open Imagery Network (OIN). The Humanitarian OSM Team relaunched OAM in 2015 to aid in humanitarian response and disaster preparedness efforts. However, it is intended to be a general purpose tool for collecting aerial imagery. Anyone can upload imagery to the project. All imagery provided by OAM and OIN is licensed under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0) and is available for tracing in OpenStreetMap.

History

OpenAerialMap began as a project to create an open collection of aerial imagery. It was available at http://openaerialmap.org/ between November 2007 and December 2008.

A key aim was to make imagery available as a tile layer (or tile layers) to be used easily within OpenStreetMap editors. Obviously the OpenStreetMap community already has a range of Aerial imagery options available. OpenAerialMap was about bringing together some of the more open licensed datasets. It also hosted some patches of imagery which were available from organisations which didn't want to host it themselves, or where they only hosted in more awkward formats such as a WMS or just geotiff downloads. OpenAerialMap offered a worldwide "canvas" on which various organisations could contribute to a patchwork of imagery.

A combination of two key challenges, scaling the hosting and licensing, caused the first iteration of OpenAerialMap to be shut down.

HOT are working to relaunch OpenAerialMap and have been awarded a Humanitarian Innovation Fund grant to do so.

OpenAerialMap project reboot meeting logs

External links