[OAM-talk] The once and future OpenAerialMap

[John Crowley]

I am new to the list, but have been following in the background. I organize a set of humanitarian field experiments at Camp Roberts, under the aegis of the Naval Postgraduate School and the National Defense University. 

Mikel Maron and David Bitner joined us in August, and our conversations there made us realize how critical a shared imagery archive has become to the development of the field of crisis mapping. We realized that the humanitarian community needs a place where civilian and military organizations can share and exchange pre- and post-crisis imagery, as well as subsquent analyses (our holy grail would be to identify visual patterns that are precursors to violence, mass migrations, and mass atrocities, including genocide). Based on those discussions, the Naval Postgraduate School subsequently offered to help catalyze the reanimation of the OAM project.

To that end, I would like to introduce NPS professor Don Brutzman. He is willing to offer  computing resources to help us bootstrap OAM, including bandwidth, storage, and (if needed) supercomputer processing power. I'll let him fill in the details. He's an open source developer himself (see his work on creating X3D, and he is on the W3C committee for HTML5). He has been using OAM for his team's research and therefore has a longstanding interest in reviving the project.

We also would like to offer a conference line to help speed these conversations. Next week, he and I will be at Camp Roberts with several other technologists and geographers. We'll be continuing the work from August, including building an open-source tool to automatically mosaic UAV still imagery. We are willing to host an OAM conference call on Thursday 12 Nov, hopefully at a time that allows our European colleagues to participate (we'll be on PST, so would early morning our time work?). Could we get a rough show of hands about who would like to participate on the call? What agenda items should we be covering? And what is the best way to ensure that the call gets back into this list? (for instance, we could record the call, if everyone agrees, and publish the audio feed, or designate someone to live-blog the call).

Taking up Charlie's point about separating conversations about technology from those about governance/organization, should we host two calls?

Looking forward to contributing to a great project,

- John Crowley


--- On Mon, 11/2/09, John Robert Peterson <jrp.crs at gmail.com> wrote:

From: John Robert Peterson <jrp.crs at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [OAM-talk] The once and future OpenAerialMap
To: talk at openaerialmap.org
Date: Monday, November 2, 2009, 5:23 PM

This is awesome -- it's looking like somthing really impressive may
come out of this.

I've been following the discussion, and I'm a great believer in
emergant properties. I think that using physical proximity to decide
what to cashe would be a mistake. I think that cashing based on
regularity of use/use of similar tiles/time since last use etc would
work better.

For example, the 2013 games in canada mentioned, when that goes up,
many people from all over the world are going to be viewing the data,
irrispective of thier physical localities. You would not want those
tiles to be dropped from a server in south africa simply because a
tile of the middle of the sahara was closer.

I'd say connect every user to a server that's close to them (in terms
of network latancy) and let the statistics determin what gets cashed
where. Though, if you need a tie breaker, by all means fall back
location.

And when you build the sytem to connect users to servers, be sure to
take into account server load.

JR


2009/11/2 Paul Ramsey <pramsey at cleverelephant.ca>:
<snip>
> I'm quite enthusiastic about this, though trying to remain cognizant
> of the fact that people in Argentina do also view Australia sometimes,
> so that use case also has to have acceptable performance
> characteristics.
>
> P.
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openaerialmap.org
> http://openaerialmap.org/mailman/listinfo/talk_openaerialmap.org
>

_______________________________________________
talk mailing list
talk at openaerialmap.org
http://openaerialmap.org/mailman/listinfo/talk_openaerialmap.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://openaerialmap.org/pipermail/talk_openaerialmap.org/attachments/20091102/a42b6e21/attachment.html>