Michal Migurski

This has been heating up. Here's the seminal paper that kicked off the Cambrian Explosion: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vmnih/docs/Mnih_Volodymyr_PhD_Thesis.pdf

And I saw two presentations about this at State of the Map US.

* Anand Thakker of Development Seed had a cool live demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BftllmqXSpA&list=PLqjPa29lMiE3eR-gK80irr3xdUiRbIMeg&index=2

* Facebook mapped a bunch of roads in Egypt, and has an ongoing effort. Facebook apparently didn't allow their's to be taped.

I have a similar project called DeepOSM: https://github.com/trailbehind/deeposm

There is starting to be a conversation in the OSM community about allowing robot edits into the map, I'm definitely pro robot. Google has been doing it for years. Mike Migurski touched off debate on the OSM Slack and blog comments with his post: http://mike.teczno.com/notes/openstreetmap-at-a-crossroads.html (added this link after maxerickson's comment reminded me what touched of the debate).

http://terrapattern.com is also a related project from some CMU people.

This space is heating up a bit.

Facebook (!) has developed a system for mapping roads and is working towards using it to add data to OpenStreetMap:

http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=55220

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12150862 (no comments)

There's several other people/groups working on similar projects, like DeepOSM:

http://www.deeposm.org/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11808639 (some discussion)

And no shortage of feels about how all the parts need to work together:

http://mike.teczno.com/notes/openstreetmap-at-a-crossroads.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12187782 (no comments)

http://tomlee.wtf/2016/07/31/introductory-openstreetmap-politics/

http://www.maproomblog.com/2016/08/openstreetmap-at-the-crossroads/

There have been earlier efforts to do automated feature extraction, but it seems that improvements in AI and better, more liberally licensed imagery are moving things towards some sort of tipping point.

There are already tiles like this, including the ones at this link. It seems like Imhof was part of the inspiration for creating them:

http://mike.teczno.com/notes/osm-us-terrain-layer.html

http://mike.teczno.com/notes/osm-us-terrain-layer/foreground.html

Though those are US only, similar tech is available for worldwide maps.

Compare:

http://www.library.ethz.ch/exhibit/imhof/images/d1.1.jpg

http://hikebikemap.de/?zoom=9&lat=46.58402&lon=7.94684&layers=00B00TFFFF

http://hikebikemap.de/?zoom=9&lat=46.58402&lon=7.94684&layers=B0000TFFFF

The primary differences are choice of colorscheme and the fact that the OSM examples are targetted at screen DPI and the paper map was probably intended to be wall mounted.

That's not a limitation of OSM, you can target different resolutions and print to large paper too, it's just not as common. Here's an example:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:3274048625_815c60625e.jpg

OSM's been pretty hardcore about their no import policy because of accuracy issues in validation. They want to map these places themselves and don't want to trust others for accuracy, let alone the legal issues that come with importing data (ugh).

We, however are far more lenient (mostly because we can't afford to build a time machine to map the past ourselves).

On the other hand, Mike Migurski's Green Means Go [1] project is fantastic for figuring out where batch imports into OSM will be greeted with confetti and parades for filling out parts of the US without enough coverage to warrant anti-import protectionism.

[1]: http://mike.teczno.com/notes/green-means-go.html