Project Open Ortho

[StuartC]

This video popped up on my Youtube today. Not sure if the Satellite imagery sources have previously been mentioned but might be usefull.

[merspieler]

thanks, I'll check it out

[merspieler]

Small but awesome news... found 2m/px resolution ortho source for europe

[TheEagle]

Wow, that's not exactly small news, that's great news ! What is that source ?

[MariuszXC]

Certainly no small news, rather Giga (or Tera) news

[radi]

10cm/px but just NRW in Germany.
"kostenfrei und zur Nutzung ohne Einschränkungen oder Bedingungen bereitgestellt." -- "free of charge and may be used without any restrictions or conditions"

https://www.bezreg-koeln.nrw.de/brk_int ... index.html
https://www.geoportal.nrw/?activetab=map

[merspieler]

awesome, thank you very much

[TheEagle]

Gosh, 10cm/px, that's an awesome resolution !

[merspieler]

Lil update since we've been silent for like half a year.

So... we've completely redesigned our worldbuild scripts to be more flexible so they can be used for this and vpb and osm2city and basically anything else one would want to do on a global scale (initial setup still needs to be improved and documented).
One thing we still kinda wanna redesign would be the map using leaflet but we've got no experience with it and displaying all the data at once causes some lag so some help implementing this would be appreciated.
We've currently still got the old map for the project available here

We've now build ortho scenery for Stuarts WS30_CA2 area. Point your terrasync client here to get the ortho scenery, base scenery needs to be downloaded separately.
This shows that the source we've got for the US is suitable and in theory we could cover the entire US (with enough motivation towards us ig. as this isn't really our area we're interested in)

With Stuart we did a minimal test of terrasync download of ws3 scenery and ortho. According to him, the test was a success.

We did solve the hosting problem for now, tho we're not sure the solution will work when ws3 and ortho will be default in a future flightgear release as we still are limited by our uplink.
Also by implementing this solution means even more cost we cover our self rn for running the required servers and infra.

As of right now, we've got about 300GB of open source, redistributeable scenery.

Where will the future take us?
As mentioned above, covering the entire US is an option (enough incentives provided), we're looking at completely covering Europe and our other place of interest Australia.
Right now we kinda also depend on having ws3 base scenery available for the areas in question as there's no global coverage yet.
Code wise we're mostly happy with how it runs now apart from the above mentioned map change and some other things on the web status page which will make our life easier running this.
Apart from that, the things we wanna do are:
* Find a way to maybe offset the costs we've got for running this (including a long needed hardware upgrade, among others cause of rising energy prices and running out of disk space)
* Add more areas by finding suitable sources. Checking them for license, adding the sources to the system and after it ran, check the results.
These are points where we could use help. No code knowledge required.

ig. that's it for now, we hope to be more active on this again, provided we've got the spoons for it.

[jakkos98]

About a year ago I posted links to another possible provider of orthophotos for Poland - https://www.geoportal.gov.pl/dane/ortofotomapa
There have been doubts as to whether it can be used because it does not have a license.
I called the department/office that makes these orthophotos available and confirmed that they can be used for any purpose as long as the source information is included as per the terms.

Terms and Conditions
Using the resources of the http://www.geoportal.gov.pl website means that you accept these Regulations without restrictions or reservations.
REGULATIONS http://www.geoportal.gov.pl
[...]
Article 3.

LIABILITY

1. Information published on the Website in accordance with Article 4(2) of the Act on Copyright and related Rights (Journal of Laws of 1994, Item 83, as amended) shall not be subject to the protection afforded by this Act.

2. Any materials originating from the Website may be published provided that the source is indicated.

Everything looks like we can use this otophoto for this project.
Unfortunately, a few months ago, after several newspaper articles written by journalists who apparently had no idea about the availability of aerial photos in many places on the Internet, some areas, including airports such as EPKK, EPWA, etc., were blurred in the name of "national security". These actions concerned only the geoportal, because Google, Microsoft, etc. still present the same areas intact.

[merspieler]

Great, thanks for confirming this.
One thing we still need to add this is a copy right string which gets shown to the user when they display the sources. Usually they give you that information. Could look like this:

GeoBasis-DE / LVermGeoRP2022, dl-de/by-2-0, www.lvermgeo.rlp.de [Daten bearbeitet]

or this

Map services and data available from U.S. Geological Survey, National Geospatial Program

So we attribute them properly.
As well as a Link to their website where the license information is discussed. So others can look at it in detail.
Once we've got this, we can start building poland

[MariuszXC]

So the official administrator and provider of this data is: (Polish) Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography ( https://www.gov.pl/web/gugik-en )
Terms and Conditions are here: https://www.geoportal.gov.pl/en/regulamin

[merspieler]

Okay so we've looked at that source in detail and unfortunately the high res source is very spotty...
For Poland it self we use copernicus data which we found a while ago, parts of it have already been built.so I think we'll just stick with the copernicus data for now. If the coverage of this source improves and we get the proper attribution data we can look at using this source in the future.

Thanks for looking at it anyways

[MariuszXC]

You are welcome.

[jakkos98]

What resolution does Copernicus have? The geoportal is 25 cm per pixel for the whole country - Standard resolution (except for small areas under "security measures" due to the war in Ukraine). High resolution (3 cm, 5 cm or 10 cm per pixel) is currently available, and in the future (unless the law changes) it will be available only for poviat (county) cities. A true orthophoto is also available for some small regions, but I don't know if it will be made for other parts.